Working across silos often requires working with other vendors.
This fact was made clear to me after attending the AHIMA convention in San Diego last month where I was able to meet with many, many company representatives to learn about their latest projects and implementations. The scope and spectrum of emerging technologies and best practices that they demonstrated were staggering. I visited booth after booth and listened to each cadre of exhibitors as they vividly outlined how their company “worked across silos” and “leveraged the knowledge of an organization’s entire group of stakeholders” to generate better outcomes and efficiencies in healthcare.
After the first day of the convention, I spent some time in my hotel room reviewing the notes I had taken during my vendor visits. Without the noise and rush of the exhibit hall, I noticed a particularly striking theme that ran throughout my observations that I was not conscious of while at the convention: Many of the most impressive solutions in healthcare do not come from a single company; rather, they are the result of vendor partnerships. While these partnerships were discussed at length within the booths at AHIMA, I could not find a single mention of them in any exhibit’s literature.
When I returned to the Health Management Technology offices after the convention, I began reviewing past issues of HMT, as well as the recent work written by many of our competitors. Again, I saw how most projects and products were being presented, for the most part, as stand-alone entities that lived in strange vacuums where other companies did not seem to exist.
While I understand that many projects are indeed conceived, designed, implemented, reviewed, revised and completed by a single company, I also know that many of the most impactful projects in healthcare are actually the product of company consortiums. These consortiums generate ideas and products that would not be possible if a company worked on its own.
I started to wonder how a conference exhibit hall would look if more companies presented their partnerships rather than just their own work. More to my own role as an editor, I started to think how a publication would look if it described more of these company partnerships. I’m not talking about posting updates of mergers or creating snapshots of company collaborations, but tracing how a group of companies organically comes together to solve complex issues.
With this vision in mind, I plan to seek out such partnerships and to document them for HMT readers. To begin this process, in December I will create a special exclusive Living Case Study of a company partnership developed to create a patient self-registration kiosk. My hope is not only to describe the processes and successes within this simple, yet impressive implementation, but to invite you to let us know about similar projects you and your company partners are creating as well.
