How can healthcare IT leaders successfully work with external vendors and partners?

Invest the time to craft well defined objectives and desired end state of the project or partnership. Being able to communicate goals and outcomes with clarity enables vendors and partners to reverse-engineer their solutions with your unique use case in mind as well as ideate within those established parameters.

Documenting and continually aligning on goals, milestones, and expectations helps healthcare IT leaders maximize the value vendors and partners deliver. - Sets objectives/priorities - Manages expectations - Documented expectations and set norms upfront for communication, timelines, escalation, roles, and responsibilities to prevent misaligned assumptions - Enables milestone tracking - Supports vendor selection/contracting - helps shape vendor evaluation criteria to choose the best-fit partner - Facilitates cost optimization - Allows risk planning - Improves quality management - Clear goals give vendors defined targets to manage and meet throughout a project proactively - Enables continuity/accountability between internal and external teams

Well-designed IT governance creates structure and efficiencies that allow healthcare IT leaders to collaborate with vendors while maintaining oversight and accountability closely. - Clarifies authority - Defines apparent decision-making authority / sign-off protocols between the healthcare organization and vendors - Streamlines processes - Guides interactions - Ensures security and compliance - Provides policies and controls to maintain patient data protections when granting vendor access. - Manages stakeholders - Increases accountability - Controls scope creep - Enables agile relationship - Informs best practices - Reduces conflicts/enables oversight - Drives risk management - Risk management is integrated into processes for quick response

Proactively addressing change and risk builds resiliency into third-party healthcare IT initiatives while enabling smoother vendor partnerships. - Conduct risk assessments - Work jointly to identify and plan for technical, operational, security, and project risks upfront. - Implement change control - Require compliance - Provide training - Educate internal teams on adapting processes to integrate vendor solutions. - Drive OCM and communication - Start small w/ iterative improvements - Monitor performance and experience - Audit regularly - Conduct periodic audits to meet contract terms, XLAs, and business outcomes. - Align executives - Secure executive sponsorship to reinforce managing risks and changes is a joint priority.

Creative Balance between Parties of Interest The most important issue between healthcare IT leader and external vendors is inability to understanding the empathy related to any issue being addressed. Creating clear roadmap for a goal with transparency is one of most forthcoming way to work as a team rather than dividing into third-party liabilities. The failure to communicate and reciprocate in a collaborative way comes when there is imbalance in give and take between these parties. Like asking for a patient referral 300 is not acceptable by a clinician to get more patients, that's is where IT sector is misused in guiding patients towards their interests of clinicians which is ethically not in interest of patient.