Running Head: STRATEGIC ALLIANCE 1 STRATEGIC ALLIANCE3 Strategic Alliance in Health Care Strategic alliance in health care arises about with accountable care in organization as related reforms aims to increase coordination between health care providers. Due to the uneven nature of health care system. Strategic alliance in health care along with successful coordination will pivot in large part on the ability of health care organization to successful partner across organizational boundaries. Furthermore, under Medicare partnership accountable care organization has lower quality enactment. This is arrived at by the use of qualitative interviews released that providers are motivated to partner for resource complementarity, risk lessening and legislative requirements. By way of conjointly bringing together official as well casual responsibility device. Strategic alliance in health care may provide an important window to screen a potential wave of health care consolidation or in contrast new models of independent providers’ successfully coordinating patient care. There has been development in the number of physicians joining the practices and physician practice joining hospital and health care system. As result coordination of clinical care often requires working transversely in organizational boundaries. This is predominantly true when providing care to intricate or high need patients who often require attention for post- acute care facilities such as skilled nursing facilities, rehabilitation centers and home health agencies strategic alliance in health care aims to encourage coordinating through financial incentive and rewards for meeting quality performance targets and total cost of care benchmarks. With required dynamic trust of association. So as to meet desired cost and quality objective. Strategic alliance in health care is recognized arrangements between two or more independent organization to succeed shared or harmonious goals. This is substantial growth in such relationships in health care sector. Notably, these arrangements between autonomous organizations are non-ownership relation based. The primary motivation for this strategic alliance in health lie in understanding needs for resources and capabilities needs to frontier transaction cost and the need to respond to external requirements from Medicare. The benefit of the strategic alliance in health care contribution risk or gaining resources, personnel benefits including improved staffing and management capabilities and organization benefits including growth, opportunities to learn and gain new proficiencies and mutual support and group collaboration. Numerous methods have been used hence mixed method analysis which involves survey data, performance data, and semi-structured interviews. Questions examined involved to what range is strategic alliance in health benefit to the health sector organization, second how is strategic alliance performance in different organ.

1. Running Head: STRATEGIC ALLIANCE 1
STRATEGIC ALLIANCE3
Strategic Alliance in Health Care
Strategic alliance in health care arises about with accountable
care in organization as related reforms aims to increase
coordination between health care providers. Due to the uneven
nature of health care system. Strategic alliance in health care
along with successful coordination will pivot in large part on
the ability of health care organization to successful partner
across organizational boundaries. Furthermore, under Medicare
partnership accountable care organization has lower quality
enactment. This is arrived at by the use of qualitative interviews
released that providers are motivated to partner for resource
complementarity, risk lessening and legislative requirements.
By way of conjointly bringing together official as well casual
responsibility device. Strategic alliance in health care may
provide an important window to screen a potential wave of
health care consolidation or in contrast new models of
independent providers’ successfully coordinating patient care.
There has been development in the number of physicians joining
the practices and physician practice joining hospital and health
care system. As result coordination of clinical care often

2. requires working transversely in organizational boundaries. This
is predominantly true when providing care to intricate or high
need patients who often require attention for post- acute care
facilities such as skilled nursing facilities, rehabilitation centers
and home health agencies strategic alliance in health care aims
to encourage coordinating through financial incentive and
rewards for meeting quality performance targets and total cost
of care benchmarks. With required dynamic trust of association.
So as to meet desired cost and quality objective. Strategic
alliance in health care is recognized arrangements between two
or more independent organization to succeed shared or
harmonious goals. This is substantial growth in such
relationships in health care sector. Notably, these arrangements
between autonomous organizations are non-ownership relation
based. The primary motivation for this strategic alliance in
health lie in understanding needs for resources and capabilities
needs to frontier transaction cost and the need to respond to
external requirements from Medicare. The benefit of the
strategic alliance in health care contribution risk or gaining
resources, personnel benefits including improved staffing and
management capabilities and organization benefits including
growth, opportunities to learn and gain new proficiencies and
mutual support and group collaboration.
Numerous methods have been used hence mixed method
analysis which involves survey data, performance data, and
semi-structured interviews. Questions examined involved to
what range is strategic alliance in health benefit to the health
sector organization, second how is strategic alliance
performance in different organization. The research gap tends to
see the disjointed nature of health care system. (Maccoby, M,
Norman, C., Norman, C. J, & Margolies, R. 2014). If there will
be need to partner strategic alliance in health care sources. So,
to have the patient population that allow stable population
estimation of cost and quality to influence more patient care in
health facilities.
Survey data analysis- this series on question on organization

3. characteristics, contract features and range of clinical and
practical capabilities. The respondent at each organization was
an exclusive or director-level administrator.
(b) Qualitative data analysis-this involved semi interviews
across the distinctive, situate was from the population, while
diversity of patient was put in thought. Studied the distribution
of sites by leadership structure, number of primary care, field of
mastery physicians, region, semi structured interview was done
by phone and emails. (Etbeze, P. 2015) Three separate
interviews guides were used, two in the first time period, while
another in the second time period.
The survey data shown that strategic alliance in health care was
very shared among the health care fraternity overall only
19%responded of the existence, 27% were coming to terms with
strategic alliance in health care 55% indicated that strategic
alliance in health care was proficient alongside other new
partners forum. With both having a high degree of alliance.
Addressing the second question there were existing organization
were most likely to have clinicians on a single electronic
medical record and to be actively engaged in evaluating patient
care gratification, working to improve ambulatory care,
considering inappropriate use of the emergency department and
engaged in reducing hospital admission and preventable hospital
re-admissions.
Probable success of the strategic alliance in health care will in
large bring turning point on the success of new partnership
between health care providers. These new partnerships as well
face greater contests as they have lower capability around care
management, quality improvement and health information
technology. (Terhune, C. 2012). They also have lesser score
particularly those measure focused on risk population and
preventive health in the initial years, they are achieving cost
saving at the same time as existing organizations this in line
with the unit of study as it looks on policy requirement about
minimum numbers of patients or prerequisite about regional
partners.

4. The results can be viewed as the claim of the article with
literature on healthcare strategic alliances and add to this
literature by highlighting the significant effects of boarder
contextual forces such as policies that promote partnerships. For
example, policy requirement about minimum number of patient
requirement about regional partner encouraged. As they provide
both helpful and undesirable consequences. On the positive side
health care providers. Particularly those in lesser organization
may prefer working in alliance setting than consolidating.
Hence providing self-sufficiency thus brings value in health
sector.
In conclusion understanding the mechanisms help to Supporting
positive strategic alliance association. With option of higher
risk and high return to achieve a better result. Understanding
the path trail and challenges will help policy makers enhance
attempt at aggressive or encouraging health providers to take
greater financial risk for population health management hence
adjusting the health sector. Given the uneven viable nature of
many health care market and subdivisions, this perception could
prove instrumental in helping transition to more harmonized,
clinically integrated and commendable based health care
system.
REFRENCES
Colla CH, Lewis VA, Bergquist SL, Shortell SM.
Accountability across the Continuum: The Participation of
Postacute Care Providers in Accountable Care
Organizations. Health Serv Res. 2016

5. Etbeze, P. (2015). CEO exchange: Different problems, shared
solutions for survival. Health Leaders Media. Retrieved from
http://healthleadersmedia.com/page-1/LED-321075/CEO-
Exchange-Different-Problems-Shared-
Solution
s-for-Survival
Healthcare Finance. (2015). Healthcare mergers and
acquisitions in 2015: Running list. Retrieved from
http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/slideshow/healthcare-
mergers-and-acquisitions-2015-running-list?p=0
Leavitt, M., & McKeown, R. (2013). Finding allies, building
alliances: 8 elements that bring—and keep—people together.
San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Lewis VA, Colla CH, Schoenherr KE, Shortell SM, Fisher ES.
Innovation in the safety net: integrating community health
centers through accountable care. J Gen Intern
Med. 2014;29(11):1484–1490.
Maccoby, M., Norman, C., Norman, C. J., & Margolies, R.
(2014). Transforming health care leadership: A systems guide to
improve patient care, decrease costs, and improve population
health. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nation [Online Library of Liberty version]. Retrieved
from http://files.libertyfund.org/files/220/Smith_0141-

6. 02_EBk_v6.0.pdf
Terhune, C. (2012). HealthCare partners to be bought by DaVita
in $4.42-billion deal. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/22/business/la-fi-davita-
healthcare-partners-20120522
1
Course Learning Outcomes for Unit VII
Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to:
7. Discuss the concept of learning organizations in health
services organizations.
8. Compare the approaches of quality assurance and quality
improvement.
Reading Assignment
Chapter 7:

7. Statistical Thinking for Health Care Leaders: Knowledge About
Variation, pp. 107-132
Chapter 9:
A Health Care Leader’s Role in Building Knowledge, pp. 169-
189
Unit Lesson
This lesson will explore the concept of learning organizations in
health service organizations, and will
compare the approaches of quality assurance and quality
improvement.
Learning Organizations
The Business Dictionary (n.d.) defines a learning organization
as an organization that acquires knowledge
and innovates fast enough to survive and thrive in a rapidly
changing environment.
Learning organizations (1) create a culture that encourages and
supports continuous employee
learning, critical thinking, and risk taking with new ideas, (2)
allow mistakes, and value employee

8. contributions, (3) learn from experience and experiment, and (4)
disseminate new knowledge
throughout the organization for incorporation into daily
activities. (Business Dictionary, n.d.)
The healthcare environment is rapidly changing with new
reimbursement systems and creating a learning
organization is paramount to success. Let’s explore these
elements and look at practical strategies to create a
learning organization.
Continuous Employee Learning
Learning is an ongoing process, and it is scary if someone does
not approach learning with that humility.
Imagine needing brain surgery and your neurosurgeon tells you
that the last time he or she was at a
Continuing Medical Education (CME) course or discussed the
latest imaging and surgical techniques with his
or her colleagues was more than 14 years ago. How would you
feel? The same need for continual medical
education also applies to managers, which could be in the form
of reading emails from list serves with current
articles and management-help and leadership books or attending
conferences and professional association

9. meetings. It is important for managers to be life-long learners
and value continuous education.
Employees have a natural thirst for training and knowledge,
particularly in health care where clinicians
conduct medical procedures and the science and knowledge is
always expanding.
The Gallup Organization has been a pioneer for decades with
employee surveys and they have found a high
correlation to the question “Have you had enough training to do
your job?” and employee engagement. Gallup
UNIT VII STUDY GUIDE
Learning Organizations and
Quality Improvement
2
UNIT x STUDY GUIDE
Title

10. draws the distinction between employee satisfaction and
employee engagement. Their saying is “Employee
satisfaction is not enough” (Adkins, 2015).
Healthcare leaders must enrich their team (and themselves) with
continuous learning opportunities. This
leads to employees feeling engaged and wanting to contribute in
valuable ways.
Valuing Employee Contribution
As employees evaluate their worth to a department or
organization and their relationship with their manager,
how would they define their worth and value? To begin to
answer these questions they would need to critically
think about what it is they want from their work relationship,
and this can vary widely by person. As a manager
helps people identify the factors that motivate and engage them,
perhaps he or she can have the team create
their own list, to rank in order what motivates them. Then,
compare their lists to this list below, which is typical
for the order of highest correlation factors to employee
engagement.

11. difference
ing opportunities for my growth and career development
decisions
pted
Knowing that these are driving factors for someone’s motivation
and knowing the person’s capabilities and the
job he or she does, a manager can tailor the approach to each
employee to maximize his or her feelings of
engagement, contribution and value.
Critical Thinking
Once someone is engaged and feels they are valued for their
contributions, the environment becomes ripe to

12. cultivate higher-order, critical thinking. One definition of
critical thinking is to examine assumptions, discern
hidden values, evaluate evidence, and assess conclusions
(Warnick, Inch, 1994). This is exactly the behavior
we want from our employees, for them to think critically and to
advance patient care. They should feel they
can independently explore problems, form a hypothesis, and
justify their position. It is hoped that they can
keep an open mind to see when their conclusions were incorrect,
make adjustments, and continue the cycle.
Most importantly, managers want employees to work
collaboratively in this cycle of critical thinking and to
experiment, as an inter-disciplinary team (IDT), to work
together for the maximum good of the patient. This
concept of critical thinking is best captured in scientific
method, which has the following steps:
on,

13. Scientists look for the science behind someone’s hypothesis,
and they look to replicate the results. While the
scientific method tends to bring to mind the picture of a lab
bench with scientists in white coats, this method
has applicability in the daily operations of health care. This
method encourages curiosity and exploration,
documentation, and open-mindedness. Managers should
encourage employees to be curious and to find
better ways to do things, and to feel they have liberty (within
the limits of not harming patients) to take risks.
Innovation and Risk Taking
When an employee feels their contributions are valued, they
will likely feel motivated and engaged; and when
they are feeling motivated and engaged, they will likely think
critically; and whey they are thinking critically,
they are bound to be innovative and experiment to take risks
and make improvements. The manager sets the
tone; he or she can make the environment one where motivation,
critical thinking, and experimentation are
celebrated and encouraged. Below please find strategies
healthcare leaders can use to encourage creative

14. thought, innovation and risk taking:
3
UNIT x STUDY GUIDE
Title
1. Encourage ideas. One company gave employees four hours a
month to innovate. There were no
strings attached and no rules. They could work with anyone, the
only rule was that they had to share
their results with the company. The company made those four
hours as much fun as possible,
bringing in food and drinks and having a buildup to the event.
Up to that point, the company had
simply tried rewarding good ideas with money, but they learned
that money does not actually spur
creativity, and people would get possessive of their ideas. What
did work was having the dedicated
time and space for innovation, and making it fun and engaging.
This approach created the best ideas

15. they had seen in years. It turned out that higher level thinking
was not correlated to money, it was
correlated to the desire for independence and autonomy.
2. Joke about mistakes: When you joke with your team about a
mistake you made, you are giving them
the space to do the same. Innovations do not come without
experimentation, and failure is part of
success.
3. Read books: Introduce a book every quarter or six months
that you read as a group, this will spur the
environment of learning and make critical thinking welcomed.
4. Attend seminars: Show that you value education and
innovation by sending people to seminars. A
secondary benefit of this is that employees bond with each other
A fascinating book on innovation techniques for managers is,
"Tribes, We Need You to Lead Us," by Seth
Godin (2008). Below are some of his thoughts:
people who have been raised to be
obedient; we give them brain-dead jobs and enough fear to keep

16. them in line. Godin uses the
example of the TSA worker who forced a mom to drink from a
bottle of her own breast milk because
any other option was not in the manual.
-sheep behavior: Godin talks about embracing non-sheep
behavior and claiming the career you
deserve by refusing to walk down the same sheep path. Make
change and start passionate
movements toward your beliefs, getting people with like ideas
connected.
organization and giving them flexibility to
build something new.
money, that we must realize it is not the
point of innovation. The point is to build your followers up,
being okay with being wrong and doing
what you believe.
Speaking of doing what you believe, typically the list of
motivators you will see includes having a sense that
the work we do is meaningful and makes a difference. Health

17. care gives us that gift of serving others and
making a difference in that person’s life. Health care is among
the most noble of employment opportunities.
Disseminating Knowledge
Sharing information is empowering to people and it only helps
motivation and productivity to increase. We live
in the era of immediate information and technology. Today’s
workers are empowered and they want to know
the why’s and how’s behind decisions. The more we can involve
our team in the decision-making process,
and the more we can involve them with information regarding
operations, the more engagement, productivity,
and innovation we will achieve.
Quality Assurance versus Quality Improvement
We need to define the difference between Quality Assurance
(QA) and Continuous Quality Improvement
(CQI). Quality Assurance is defined as an effort to overcome
problems with quality (Lohr, 1991), while
Continuous Quality Improvement is defined as combining a
scientific methodology with a management
philosophy of improving processes continually (Goldstone,

18. 1997).
Regarding QA, have you ever met a business owner or person
who seems to live in the past without
innovation, who seems to rest on their laurels, as though they
feel their past achievements have put them in a
sufficient space of comfort and distinction? That can be the
result of QA, the assumption that if serious
failures are inspected and eliminated, the rest must somehow be
excellent or good enough (Goldstone,
1997). When we stop innovating, we leave things to the chance
or luck of QA, a passive approach to simply
maintain the status quo, to not rock the boat too much. QA
programs are what we used to call our healthcare
quality committees 10 years ago.
4
UNIT x STUDY GUIDE
Title

19. Regarding CQI, there is a great saying by the legendary author
of Good to Great, Jim Collins (2001), “What
got you here won’t get you there.” With CQI we embrace the
concept of Total Quality Management (TQM),
that no system is finite, but each system affects another. One
hospital historically had systems and silos of
care, for example a great cardiology department that operated
separately of the radiology department, both
operating separately of the emergency department. That silo
thinking and merely assuring the quality of one
area does not work. The new wave in quality is CQI. Aside from
CQI being a philosophy, It is a methodology
of industrial and statistical process control; it is looking at
regression analysis to see what factors are causal
to which outcomes, and continuously changing processes and
controls to create more desirable outcomes.
There is always the possibility to improve quality. Today’s
healthcare environment demands that we focus
continuously, relentlessly, and fanatically on improvement.
After all, human life is in our hands.
References
Adkins, A. (2015). Majority of U.S. employees not engaged

20. despite gains in 2014. Gallup. Retrieved from
http://www.gallup.com/poll/181289/majority-employees-not-
engaged-despite-gains-2014.aspx
Collins, J. (2001). Good to great. New York, NY:
HarperCollins.
Goldstone, J. (1997). The role of quality assurance versus
continuous quality improvement. Journal of
Vascular Surgery, 28(2), 378-380.
Learning Organization. (n.d.). In The Business dictionary [Web
page]. Retrieved from
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/learning-
organization.html
Lohr, K. N. (1991). Quality of health care: An introduction to
critical definitions, concepts, principles, and
practicalities. Ann Arbor, MI: Health Administration Press.
Warnick, B., & Inch, E. (1994) Critical Thinking and
Communication (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Macmillan.