Strategic partnership in healthcare industry

In today’s increasingly competitive environment, where hospitals have grown drastically in number and the big groups are still building up each year, it is now an essential element of a company’s growth strategy to form strategic relationships with the best-in-class partners for your expansion needs. The pressure of being top with the best means you must have the best partners in India and around the globe to make this happen. Hence, strategic partnerships exist in nearly all areas of authority, including healthcare business and are evolving partnerships.

Definition

Dr Vandana Sharma Unit Head, Indus Healthcare

To understand what this means let’s have a quick look over the definition of the term strategic partnership. A strategic partnership (definition from Wikipedia) is defined as a formal alliance between two enterprises, usually formalised by one or more business contracts but falls short of forming a legal partnership or, agency, or corporate affiliate relationship. They bring together representatives from the statutory, voluntary, community and private sectors to address problems, allocate funding, discuss strategies and initiatives and aim to encourage joint working. As it is not possible to build hospitals/offices all over country or globally, which is financially also unviable hence from expansion point of view strategic partnerships can be thought of. With a sole purpose to achieve specific business objectives by maximising the effectiveness of each partner participating, such partnerships can go a long way. But yes for sure for strategic partnership to work, there should be good amount of trust between the parties/partners as distrust can lead to the failure of partnerships.

Strategic partnership projects of Indus Healthcare

Indus Healthcare has been fortunate enough to avail the opportunity of partnering the Government, nationally and internationally, on various projects. The major projects in partnership with the government are:

• Surgical camp at Rekangpeo, Himachal Pradesh under National Rural Health Mission in 2012. Indus Healthcare team did its first Partnership Project with Government of Himachal Pradesh under National Rural Health Mission successfully doing 60 total surgeries (including 20 major general surgeries, 20 gynae major surgeries and 20 cataract surgeries) in remotest area of Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh where the medical facilities though available are not as advanced as in tier one cities. Where super speciality doctors and intensive care is lacking in the area Indus Healthcare accepted the challenge and with zero mortality completed the project.
• Establishing Mother and Child Hospital Hospital at Fatehgarh Sahib, Punjab on PPP Mode, 2013-2014. We have been shortlisted by Goverment of Punjab for establishment of Mother and Child Hospital (in partnership with Government of Punjab) on Public Private Partnership (again a strategic partnership project). In its first phase with 30 beds and to be taken to 60 beds in next five years. This hospital would be based again in a rural area of Punjab. Fatehgarh Sahib (a historical town) is located 30 km away from the city with one civil hospital and low socio-economic group of people. The land will be allocated by the government with certain concessions, but hospital will serve the area and need of the local people, where mortality is high among pregnant women and new borns.
• Gynaecology Backlog Project in Africa in 2011-2012. We also had the opportunity for working internationally in Africa for betterment of HIV related gynaecological diseases. Under this project major gynaecological proicedures were conducted successfully in Africa through a partnership with local health-sector stakeholders and NGOs.

Conclusion

Right strategic partnership means:

• Spreading risk and trusting other companies to act in joint best interests
• A match between partners so that objectives match show synergy
• Identify complementary skills, competencies and resources in partners
• Sharing highly confidential information among the partners.

Advantages

Partnerships can help an organisation:

• Find an outlet for excess capacity
• Gain quick and low risk access to new emerging markets
• Strengthen technology base
• Achieve economies through high volume, low cost and mass distribution
• Overcome globally geographic, legal and trade barriers
• Speeding up innovation and new product formation and introduction

Disadvantages

Unsuccessful partnerships may result in the following:

• A lack of strategic fit between partners
• An imbalance in the inter- relationship between the partners
• Implementation problems because of different leadership styles
• A lack of trust and confidence
• Slow decision making
• Key requirements for a market project are concentrated in one of the partners Hence strategic partnership is a modern business strategy even for healthcare business that will prove effective in these times of complexity, network organisations and social system change. Such co-operative relationships can help organisations gain new competencies, increase their commercial reach, and share resources and risks, and to move more quickly to take up new ventures and explore new opportunities.