Blogs

On Collaboration and Strategy

The AUPHA Board held its fall meeting in collaboration with the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) meeting in Boston. I will say more about this shortly, but before I do there are two particular Board initiatives I want to let you know about. First, as you may be aware, the Board is currently looking for the next editor of the Journal of Health Administration Education. In the process of deliberating on the qualifications and expectations of the next editor, we had lengthy discussions about the journal itself and its future. AUPHA financially subsidizes the journal, because it is a critical outlet for the profession, but the value of the journal is limited by its limited readership and impact. My own view is that much of the material published in the journal is high quality work that would benefit a larger audience if it were more widely available, but because of its low impact factor and limited circulation, this work rarely reaches beyond our own membership. This does not benefit the authors or the field. The Board discussed this situation at length and asked the Finance Committee to evaluate the potential impact of moving the journal to an open access model. Upon the recommendation of the Finance Committee, the Board unanimously approved moving the journal to an open access model. I believe this could be a transformative move for the journal and encourage all of us to continue to submit high quality manuscripts.

The second item I want you to be aware of is the development of an undergraduate exit examination. The Board has approved a contract with an external contractor to develop the exam, which will be available to all AUPHA certified programs. The exam will be voluntary, but will provide an objective assessment of knowledge, skills, and abilities for individual programs, and important benchmarking data across programs. The value of an effort like this lies in the decision of programs to participate, as the more programs that choose to participate the better the data will be for both individual programs and for the field.

I mentioned at the beginning of this blog that we held our fall Board meeting in collaboration with MGMA at its Annual Meeting. We also held the first MGMA/AUPHA Academic Forum as a part of the MGMA meeting. The forum topic was “The Consumerism of Health Care – Through the Lens of Medical Group Practice and Ambulatory Care.” The forum was successful, and we plan to move ahead with the second forum next year. The leadership of both MGMA and AUPHA recognize the value that arises from collaborations like this to advance the field and we are committed to expanding our relationship.

Many of you know that AUPHA holds an Academic Forum in collaboration with HIMSS every year and has for the last 13 years and will be holding the 14^th Academic Forum at the HIMSS 2019 meeting. We have held our spring Board meeting and Graduate Program and Practitioner Workshop in collaboration with the ACHE Congress for many years, not only because it provides a convenient opportunity for many of our members, but also because of the critical importance of our relationship and collaboration with ACHE. We have held several fall Board meetings in collaboration with the NAHSE Annual Meeting. These activities reflect a deliberate strategy of the Board to maintain and increase collaboration across a variety of critical stakeholder organizations in the health care management field.

The Board engaged in strategy level discussions at its fall meeting and the topic of collaboration was central to the discussion. Put simply, the Board believes that the challenges facing the field of health care management, and health care management education, are significant, and that the key to facing those challenges lies in collaboration. I recognize that there is an inherent and perhaps inevitable amount of competition between our member and non-member programs, and between various organizations that are committed in one way or another to advancing the quality of health care management. I submit, however, that contrary to much of the conventional wisdom and the literature on strategy, there is a great deal of value to be gained from cooperation and collaboration. I believe that we all recognize this instinctively, but we are also hard pressed in facing our day to day challenges to step back and critically examine opportunities to work together to the benefit of all parties involved.

I believe that the we have the opportunity to benefit from cooperation and collaboration in the critical work that we do in developing the future leaders of health care organizations. But I want to know what you think about this. Do you agree we have opportunities for collaborations and cooperation to advance the field? If so, what are they? Where do you see that we should cooperate rather than compete? What outcomes would you like to see as a result? Please leave a comment here or reach out to me directly to let me know your thoughts.