Debbie Witchey: Collaboration Between Stakeholders, the Federal Government Key to Improve Healthcare

Collaboration between stakeholders and the federal government is critical to addressing underlying gaps in patient care, said Debbie Witchey, MHA, executive vice president of the Healthcare Leadership Council.

Transcript

Through your experience assisting in the creation of public-private partnerships, how vital is it for stakeholders and providers to collaborate to avoid underlying gaps in patient care?

Collaboration from my perspective is critically important, both between stakeholders, among stakeholders, but also with including the federal government in that. We’ve done a lot of work on disaster preparedness and what we’ve seen happen is the government has 1 silo where they’re working in, and then the other stakeholders are either working with them in their own sectors or sometimes they’re crossing over; but you’re trying to get medical records in a community when they’re not available, or trying to get medicines or medical supplies to people. We literally were having CEOs of healthcare entities calling their personal friends to try to get airplanes and trying to get things into people. So, what we’ve seen, particularly since Puerto Rico, is that the federal government has realized that they need to interact better and have more interaction with stakeholders in the private sector. So, we’re starting to work together—the National Academy of Medicine is working together and you’re already seeing, although we certainly haven’t had the severity of situation that we had last year, but seeing things work better–so, that’s 1 example.

Another example where I think stakeholders working together is critically important is in the opioid space. So, you can’t just address the opioid issue from a law enforcement perspective or from a healthcare perspective, but everyone really needs to come together and try to address the issue. When that started to happen through a lot of efforts both legislative and on the private sector side in the healthcare community and non-healthcare community, we’re slowly starting to see the death rate go down.