Networking

As our first informal publication received over the 1.000 views in less than 24 hours, it is worth to offer some complementary explanation.

Networking in care has spontaneously been thought in two different ways by most of the stakeholders. But when it comes to combine hospital networking & care way networking  questions raise

Hospital networks should tent to cost reduction by mutualizing human and material resources & by a fair distribution of patients avoiding a situation where everyone does everything with a risk of internal competition & overconsumption to keep purchasing power.

In a network different strategies are possible. Going from classical mergers to holding structures fixing a group strategy & globalizing revenues & expenses or joint-ventures where each hospital conserves a real autonomy within the fixed outcomes for the group depending on the environment & the maturity of the hospitals working together.

Care networking is something completely different. Care networking always starts from a pathology. A clinical leader (from care giver to government) decides to build a complete integrated care way around a pathology and bring the needed resources together to meet patients’ expectations based on medical, financial & wellbeing matters.

A hospital network presents a major advantage when it comes to set up complete integrated care way as they concentrate medical & managerial competences, but to be successful, hospitals should paradoxically abandon the idea of a hospital-centric care and focus on hospital-centric leadership in transversal medical projects & integrated care.

The time “all (care)roads lead to the hospital” is definitively gone but hospitals will have a major mission in creating, supporting & managing care pathways in the future and hospital networking offers a fertile ground for it.

This means also that first line care & home care should be able to count on hospital network as a supporting partner in care. It will clearly take some time to change mentalities and we should start now but changes are unavoidable as patients’ expectations evolving rapidly & as the financial issues bring us to an obligation of quality, cost & wellbeing efficiency.

BHCT team