HealthPartners: Changes in the Healthcare Organization’s Strategic Direction Presentation

Introduction

HealthPartners, a non-profit health care provider located in Minnesota, merged with Park Nicollet Health Services in 2013 (HealthPartners, 2014).

Points important to discuss:

• changes in goals and the mission;
• the role of leadership in the process;
• reasons to merge;
• the merger’s impact on the organization.

HealthPartners’s merger led to:

• integrating cultures;
• new approaches to the coordination of patient care;
• implementing new strategies in the process of care delivery.

Organizational Overview: HealthPartners

HealthPartners’s Past and Current Mission

• Past Mission: “To provide high quality, efficient, and affordable care for patients” (HealthPartners, 2014).
• Current Mission: “To improve health and well-being in partnership with our members, patients and community (HealthPartners, 2014).

HealthPartners’s Past and Current Vision

• Past Vision: Excellence of diagnosis and treatment.
• Current Vision: “Health as it could be, affordability as it must be, through relationships built on trust” (HealthPartners, 2014).

The Organization’s Past Goals

1. to improve the care for patients in the community;
2. to improve the family support;
3. to improve the patient care delivery;
4. to make patients healthier;
5. to make the health care in Bloomington affordable for the community members.

The Organization’s Current Goals

1. to double the number of patients who can “achieve optimal health as measured by improved healthy lifestyle behaviors” (HealthPartners, 2014);
2. to improve the quality of preventive services and chronic disease treatment;
3. to “reduce socioeconomic and physical environmental barriers to better health” (HealthPartners, 2014).

Rationale for the Strategic Shift

• Better experiences;
• More affordable care for community members;
• Becoming a leading healthcare organization in the community;
• Significant efficiency in services;
• Improvement of the technological base;
• Improvement of geographic distribution;
• Improvement of the overall care of provided services (Boffeli, Thongvanh, Evans, & Ahrens, 2012, p. 20).

HealthPartners’s Strategic Shift: Merger

The merger: “two organizations combine through mutual agreement to form a single new organization” (Swayne et al., 2009, p. 221).

Features:

• the use of existing resources;
• expansion of the impact;
• the increase of the competitive advantage (Chreim, Williams, & Coller, 2012, p. 215; Zismer, 2013, p. 169).

Impact of Strategic Shift

Impact on Governance and Structure

• the establishment of the centralized organization;
• uniting the clinics under the name of HealthPartners;
• centralized governance with the focus on the consumer-governed board of directors (Creasy & Kinard, 2013, p. 59).

Shifts in Strategies

• focus on patients in Minnesota and Wisconsin;
• policies to address the needs of the increased number of patients (AHRQ, 2014).

Integration of Cultures

• Similar cultural paths, ethical codes, and values.

Delivery and Character of Services

• No changes in the delivery;
• Improved access to general and special services.

Quality

• Improvement of the quality;
• Advanced technologies (HealthPartners, 2014).

Health Care Professionals’ Activities

• Focus on expanding the services (Zuckerman, 2011, p. 4).

Conclusion

The analysis focused on

• the steps associated with the merger;
• shifts in the organization’s direction;
• changes in the number of public targeted and served by HealthPartners;
• changes in the number and character of performed tasks.

The organizations achieved the success while

• combining the similar cultures;
• formulating new mission and goals;
• proposing new strategies to organizing the work of health care professionals.

References

AHRQ: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s. (2014). Web.

AMA: American Medical Association. (2014). Web.

Boffeli, T., Thongvanh, K., Evans, S., & Ahrens, C. (2012). Patient experience and physician productivity: debunking the mythical divide at HealthPartners clinics. The Permanente Journal, 16(4), 19-25.

Chreim, S., Williams, B., & Coller, K. (2012). Radical change in healthcare organization. Journal of Health Organization and Management, 26(2), 215-236.

Creasy, T., & Kinard, J. (2013). Health care mergers and acquisitions: Implications of robbers cave realistic conflict theory and prisoner’s dilemma game theory. Health Care Management, 32(1), 58-68.

Culture and performance. (2014). Web.

HealthPartners. (2014). Web.

Isham, G., Zimmerman, D., Kindig, D., & Hornseth, G. (2013). HealthPartners adopts community business model to deepen focus on nonclinical factors of health outcomes. Health Affairs, 32(8), 1446–1452.

Swayne, L. E., Duncan, W. J., & Ginter, P. M. (2009). Strategic management of health care organizations. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Zismer, D. (2013). How might a reforming U.S. healthcare marketplace threaten balance sheet liquidity for community health systems? Journal of Healthcare Management, 58(3), 168-172.

Zuckerman, A. (2011). Healthcare mergers and acquisitions: Strategies for consolidation. Frontiers of Health Services Management, 27(4), 3-12.