Helping Foundations Use Leadership Development to Spark Cross-Sector Partnering

The transition in healthcare from “more is better” to “better is better” is amplifying the need to strengthen connections among multiple provider types, payers, and consumers to improve healthcare quality and experience while driving down costs. At the same time, industry leaders acknowledge that health means more than medical care – social, physical, and economic factors all impact health. With the social determinants of health in mind, integrating community-based organizations into the healthcare continuum is becoming a key strategy for improving the health of populations and lowering medical care spending. For two foundation clients focused on health and aging services, investing in partnerships between community-based organizations and healthcare entities means investing in achieving new potential across the healthcare system.

The Highlights

• We partnered with an expert in healthcare economics, leadership, and management capacity-building to deliver a program to help our clients’ grantees take advantage of emerging trends and maximize their contributions in active partnerships with healthcare providers and payers.
• As part of this initiative, which included classroom learning and individualized application, our on-site programs for two foundations have helped 19 community-based organizations learn more about the business of healthcare and build new skills in areas such as service design, contract negotiations, pricing models, and cross-sector partnership development.
• By providing a program focused on organizational capacity-building, the foundations helped position their CBO grantees to enter into formal partnerships with healthcare organizations. These partnerships can improve home and community-based care for tens of thousands of seniors each year.

The Approach

Collaborative Consulting joined forces with an expert in healthcare leadership to help our health-focused foundation clients empower CBOs with capacity-building, business-focused initiatives to catalyze new partnerships. Our solution combined our partner’s MBA-style classes with on-the-ground implementation services delivered directly to our clients’ grantees. We supported these initiatives with the tools, knowledge, and skills development the grantees needed to make their organizations attractive, aligned partners for healthcare providers and payers.

To help bring strategies to life and build momentum for cross-sector partnerships, we:

• Used design thinking to integrate organizational strengths, external market analyses, and the needs of each community’s consumers to identify promising models.
• Helped build internal capacity for researching market and policy trends to better understand the landscape and existing opportunities.
• Designed assessment tools that allowed each CBO to conduct a self-assessment from multiple perspectives, such as leadership, operations, new model design, marketing and sales, and board development.
• Consulted on how CBOs could best articulate a unique value proposition to prospective healthcare provider and payer partners.
• Designed new service delivery models to align with the objectives of healthcare providers and payers.
• Supported organizational restructuring so leadership teams could better address emerging trends and maximize their contributions to partnership engagements.

The Potential Realized

One of our foundation clients supported a first cohort of six CBO grantees in signing more than 27 contracts with healthcare providers, with the potential to serve more than 16,000 consumers annually. The CBOs who participated in our client’s program built new leadership capabilities, improved their infrastructure to increase operational efficiency, and transformed their internal cultures to embrace the business side of health.

For both foundations, their new health services partners, and the people they serve, the payoff from investing in skills building, leadership training, and cross-sector partnership development is coming to fruition through effective medical-social integration.ng, and cross-sector partnership development coming to fruition in the form of true medical-social integration.