On the Same (Sheet of Music) in Healthcare

What does being “better together” mean? It reminds me of playing trumpet with other musicians in my local youth symphony.

You might expect a young musician’s favorite moment to be from a big public performance, like those we did at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. Those performances were heady experiences, to be sure, but one of the purest moments for me took place during a break at one of our weekend rehearsals. Three of us trumpeters played a piece with interlocking melodies, and it sounded beautiful, how the melody and harmony came together as we played.

In that moment, we were better together.

Collaboration like this inspires people in other modes of life, as well, including healthcare. It creates momentum. It creates music. As we come together to address some of the most pressing challenges in healthcare today, we can approach our work by recognizing that we’re better together and by reading from the same sheet of music.

I sat down with Melanie Marcus, our chief marketing and customer experience officer, to see what being “better together” means to her.

Bradley: We spend time and effort gathering people and organizations across healthcare in the belief that we’re better together. Why do this?

Marcus: I’ll start with what our CEO Frank Harvey wrote on LinkedIn about the Evolving Care Team Summit last July: “Despite the differences in the services they provide, the clinicians, health plans and advocacy organizations who came together for the Evolving Care Team Summit in D.C. earlier this summer proved that, not only can we have meaningful conversations about ways to work better together, but we really do share the same goal of improving patient care.”

Like your trumpet playing, we can’t make this kind of interlocking music all on our own.

The effort to address clinician burnout is a good example. 29% of surveyed physicians, physician assistants and nurse practitioners said they are very or somewhat likely to leave their profession in the next year due to burnout, but this isn’t a problem for clinicians to solve all on their own. It takes all of us working together across healthcare. In the effort to alleviate burnout, we’re better together.

Bradley: You said that addressing burnout takes working together across healthcare. What does it mean to work “across healthcare”?

Marcus: Along with addressing burnout, you can see that with how the care team is evolving. We’re seeing physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants partnering with pharmacists who can support routine care services and medication management for patients with chronic conditions like diabetes and high cholesterol. These pharmacists are filling gaps as accessible care providers. This is a great example of people in different roles working together across healthcare, and in my view, collaborating like this is the key to success. It ultimately helps patients access quality, safe, less costly care.

I’d also mention that a growing number of forward-looking states are adopting policies (and payment models) to empower pharmacists to provide a range of services aligned with their clinical ability.

Bradley: What are some other ways that we’re better together?

Marcus: I think of technological innovation, which comes from deliberate efforts to collaborate alongside industry stakeholders, like our joint initiative with The Sequoia Project to advance pharmacy interoperability.

At Surescripts, we originally set out to modernize the process for prescribing and filling medications, and we did that by working with industry stakeholders from the start. Healthcare has evolved since then, of course, but we’ve evolved right along with healthcare to help meet the challenges. What hasn’t changed is our collaborative mindset and approach.

Bradley: How do we collaborate on technological innovation for the good of patient care?

Marcus: One example is access to clinical information. In a survey, 85% of pharmacists and 57% of other clinicians put a high priority on connecting both pharmacists and prescribers with centralized information about their patients. Access to clinical information enables pharmacists to fill gaps as accessible care providers, but to enable access, stakeholders must come together to advance, adopt and use the technology so that all members of the care team can work from the same page of the patient’s clinical information.

That’s reading from the same sheet of music, in my opinion.