Healthcare leaders recognize the need to work across the care continuum to create partnerships and to consolidate operations. But choosing the right strategic partners and ensuring an actual partnership exists is tricky. The best strategic partnerships develop when organizations consider that an expert partner can be better positioned to provide a vital function in the joint pursuit of a desired outcome.
Vested® outsourcing is a mindset and methodology developed by researchers at the University of Tennessee (UT). Kate Vitasek – a UT faculty member and the lead researcher for Vested – defines the methodology as one that guides the creation of highly collaborative supplier partnerships, based on achieving mutually defined desired outcomes. Vitasek explains, “Historically, most companies outsource using transactional or risk shifting performance-based deals. These models work very well in an environment where the supplier has total control over outcomes, but that's rarely the case in healthcare as there are many uncontrollable factors in a care episode.”
The UT research shows it's far better to craft a strategic deal that uses collaborative relational contracting principles tied to an outcome-based economic model. Vitasek explains, “Rather than paying a logistics provider a transactional fee such as per unit shipped or per mile traveled, a Vested outsourcing deal focuses on an end result that both parties want: formulating more efficient mechanisms to satisfy customer needs."
"When a company uses a pricing model with incentives that aligns the buyer and supplier's interests to business outcomes, it creates a true win-win outsourcing deal. In short, the parties are vested in each other's success.”
Whether you're trying to drive cost out of an existing logistics operation, enable a shared services initiative or cut transportation costs embedded within products you're buying, these aren't things that a logistics provider or a healthcare organization can do alone. By empowering intra-company logistics to become a strategic asset, we can drive new forms of value.
We have to work together to redefine needs and develop systems that effectively meet those needs. The big picture is not about making marginal improvements to existing systems. It's about collaborating to imagine new processes.
