Collaboration to solve intractable industrywide challenges is common in many highly competitive industries, including automotive, media, pharmaceutical and technology. Collaboration has also been a means for members of an industry to address new problems for which no road map exists. Healthcare reform offers no clear path to success, but the results of the collaborative efforts in the Midwest may be instructive.
Our most recent
Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals studies show that the Midwest is the location of the majority of the
100 Top Hospitals and
Top Health Systems. Leaders of these hospitals have guided their organizations to new national levels of performance across quality, post-discharge outcomes, efficiency, patient perception of care and financial stability. The majority of the states with the highest balanced hospital performance are also in the Midwest. The five highest-performing states—Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa—have left previously high-performing states, such as California and Florida, far behind.
There is no scientifically proven cause for the rapid rise of Midwestern hospital performance. However, we hope to conduct research to learn more about this industry shift. In the meantime, after a review of the data and visits to many of the winning organizations, I can offer a hypothesis for why the Midwest leads: hospital and health system leaders in the five highest-performing states consciously chose to collaborate rather than compete on quality.
As early as 2002, Midwestern hospital, health system and state hospital association leaders courageously committed to collaborate on transparency and quality improvement to solve two intractable industrywide problems: the prevalence of poor patient safety and unnecessary deaths in hospitals. Since then, these leaders have remained closely involved in and committed to collaboration to improve quality across the region or state as well as within their organizations. By choosing to collaborate rather than compete on quality, the effort to improve quality gained traction quickly. The need to improve quality swiftly led to improved processes and systems, greater efficiency, better outcomes and lower costs.
If the hypothesis is correct, collaboration among competitors has succeeded far beyond the original expectations. Collaboration may be an equally effective means of addressing some of the unknowns of healthcare reform. Healthcare leaders who have the courage to collaborate will drive far broader success for not only their organizations but also the entire industry. Thomson Reuters is committed to developing the new forms of market and business intelligence to further that success.
