Payer-Provider-Pharma Collaboration is the Next Big Thing

Payers, providers, and pharmaceutical corporations have not always had the best of relationships, though they have worked on occasion to achieve success. According to experts, now is the time, post epidemic , for greater collaboration than ever before.

• A bridge: As the Covid-19 outbreak wreaked havoc on the healthcare system, stakeholders discovered that the only way out was to band together. The vaccination deployment was perhaps the most visible example of teamwork under Covid. The advantages of industrial cooperation will assist not only the ongoing vaccination deployment but also telehealth, which accelerated during the pandemic.
• Collaboration:  “Seeing the amount of collaboration, the number of stakeholders involved, and the willingness of everyone to put roadblocks and barriers aside and work together to get this vaccine out and into the arms of the American people has really been a testament to the way collaboration can occur,” said Saira Haque, senior director of clinical informatics at Pfizer, during A HIIMS session.
• Focused health: Dr. Shantanu Nundy, CMO of employer-focused health and benefits solution provider Accolade echoed this sentiment during the panel. “That connective tissue and muscle that we built on that scientifically and clinically led collaboration…is a muscle memory that will continue to benefit us going forward,” he said.
• Vital: Virtual visits have now become a vital component of the care continuum, Nundy added, because of the pandemic’s seismic shift in the way treatment is given. This transition has given the healthcare businesses have the potential to digitally integrate more services. Nundy stated that having certain goals to meet, such as getting a given number of doses into a specified number of arms by a certain date, helped the vaccine rollout tremendously.
• Distributed care:  “Rather than thinking about it as telemedicine or virtual, I’ve been [thinking] about it as distributed care,” Nundy said. “Distributed care to me is the concept of we need to meet people where they are… this idea of [not having] care start in a clinic or a hospital, but [having] it starts closer to home, to community, to workplaces.”