AUPHA member academic organizations prepare students to manage and lead healthcare organizations by assembling expertise from a diverse set of academic disciplines. Because healthcare organizations are so complex, it takes a wide range of skills and competencies to work effectively in these organizations. As a result, our faculty often comes from economics, medicine, organizational behavior, nursing, finance, and law and informatics among other disciplines. One of our great strengths comes from our ability to assemble, coordinate, and deliver a curriculum with these disparate parts effectively.
The question one might ask is how can we do this? The quick answer is that we often partner effectively with others to create solutions that benefit us and provide benefits for our collaborators. AUPHA consists of a highly diverse set of member organizations with different needs, interests, and priorities. To provide value to this diverse membership, we must work on many activities from HAMPCAS to Benchmarking to undergraduate certification among many others. These activities often take expertise that is hard for us to maintain on staff. Consequently, we too have learned to collaborate effectively with others to create solutions that benefit us and provide benefits to our collaborators.
A great example of that type of mutually beneficial collaboration has been with the David A. Winston Health Policy Fellowship. The benefits of this to AUPHA members are many. Two member programs’ students are selected each year for the coveted Winston Health Policy Fellowship in Washington D.C. The Fellowship provides an excellent first step on the path for those students interested in pursuing careers in healthcare policy. The learning and more importantly, the network created in this one-year fellowship provides a vital launch to a health policy career. This year’s Fellows are from Tulane and Boston University but past Fellows have come from 25 different universities. In addition, Winston supports ten scholarships each year for current students interested in a career in health policy. The scholarships are another benefit for AUPHA members. The Winston Fellowship, on the other hand, receives the benefits of administrative support from AUPHA for its events along with access to the best, brightest, and most committed students from across the nation. Both organizations benefit from the collaboration and by working together we create value that neither organization could achieve independently.
As a specific example of this collaboration, on October 9, 2014, the David A. Winston Health Policy Fellowship sponsored a Health Policy Symposium. This amazing program was developed primarily for the benefit of the ten 2014/15 Winston Scholars who are students from AUPHA member programs. These scholars were treated to a one-day program featuring some of the top health policy experts in the nation. The program consisted of eleven speakers who discussed healthcare reform from their individual or organizational perspectives. These presentations were selected to provide the scholars both balanced and contrasting points of view. The speakers included:
- Sean Cavanaugh, Deputy Administrator and Director, Center for Medicare, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
- James Capretta, Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, American Enterprise Institute
- Karen Ignagni, President and CEO, America’s Health Insurance Plans
- Four individuals from the House and Senate
- Matt Hoffmann, Budget Analyst, House Committee on the Budget
- Erin Richardson, Professional Staff and Health Council, Minority, House Committee on Ways and Means
- Meghan Taira, Legislative Director, Office of Senator Charles Schumer
- Jay Khosla, Policy Director and Chief Health Counsel, Senate Committee on Finance
- Chip Kahn, President, Federation of American Hospitals
- Margaret Garikes, Director, Division of Federal Affairs, American Medical Association
- Tom Scully, Senior Counsel, Alston & Bird, LLC and former Administrator of CMS
- Chris Jennings, President, Jennings Policy Strategies and former White House coordinator of health reform.
The views of these experienced health policy leaders provided some surprises to me and I am sure gave the scholars remarkable insights to the health policy debate. The question/answer session indicated that the scholars were pretty well informed but new insights were delivered during the day. I suspect that the symposium gave the scholars even more interest in pursuing a health policy career.
The resources for the Fellows support for the scholars and the health policy expertise available during the Symposium would be nearly impossible for AUPHA to provide alone. We create added value to our member organizations and their students by collaborating with Winston. The lesson is that meeting the goals of AUPHA and its member programs requires access to a diverse array of skilled individuals. AUPHA and each of you must continually seek those opportunities, large and small, to provide more value by bringing together available resources around us. Many have other schools, healthcare delivery organizations, government agencies, supply chain and many other potential partnerships. Let’s see how we improve what we do by finding strategic collaborators.