Giving Compass' Take:

• Borderless Charity, Inc. explains how partnerships can increase healthcare access in the United States and around the world. 

• What partnerships offer the greatest opportunities for impact? 

• Find out how funders can accelerate health system improvement. 

While the U.S. has been ranked first by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the nation with the highest total annual spending per person on health (US$ 8,362), it doesn’t necessarily translate to a timely or easy access to health services. The WHO, in its assessment of 191 countries’ health systems, ranked the U.S. a mere thirty-seventh.

Access to healthcare is such a complex challenge on so many levels. It requires so many resources people-wise, infrastructure-wise, and tool-wise, that the solution simply could not come from any single stakeholder.

When the health professionals work collaboratively with mutual respect and understanding, the timeliness or ease of access to healthcare is considerably made more efficient.

After instituting payment reforms, the public and private sectors need to collaborate to implement outcome-based quality measures, leveraging technology that makes it easier and more efficient for healthcare providers to improve care and for patients to receive care. An example of this is utilizing electronic data systems that pave the way for the timely delivery of medical services.

Through a team-based culture and the sharing resources and infrastructure, the two competing health systems were able to achieve success in patient outcomes and reduced costs. The paper also provides guidelines on how to go about an inter-professional collaborative framework. It also enumerates the authors’ lessons learned, and challenges to this kind of framework.

Read the full article about collaborative healthcare at Medium.