The Power of Collaboration and Partnership

The Power of Collaboration and Partnership

Jul 31, 2020

By: Catherine Saar 

When the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) envisioned enhancing and updating a website intended to help Health Center Controlled Networks (HCCNs) collaborate more easily and exchange resources quickly, collaboration and partnership helped NACHC to turn their vision into a reality.

With the third edition of the HRSA funded Network Resource Guide (NRG) about to be released, the site is more robust and user-friendly than ever. The result is the culmination of a collaboration that started in 2019 between HCCN leaders and the NACHC team, coordination and project integration provided by Integrated Work and a partnership with Merge Studio, a Colorado-based website design and development firm.

The NRG site empowers HCCN leaders and their staff to quickly get answers to a variety of inquiries such as when they want insights and use cases for a new or different Population Health Management System, or perhaps when there is a need to support a certain EHR that only a few of their health centers use.

The NRG allows the user to easily navigate and search what systems HCCNs are using and how broadly they are using it with their health centers. Based on that information, HCCNs may collaborate in a variety of ways from advice and insight sharing, to more formal partnership arrangements. In either case, the result is more efficient and effective pathways to amplifying their impact in the health center world.

A project like this one requires a great deal of effort and coordination. As part of the process, Integrated Work, with its focus on a human first approach, convened a team of HCCN leaders who were willing to volunteer their time to attend a focus group to share their feedback on site design and usability prior to final launch. Importantly, more than 35 HCCNs took the time to input and update pages and pages of data, the backbone of what makes the site valuable and informative.

According to Jennifer Nolty, Director of PCA & Network Relations at NACHC, maintaining the site is an on-going priority and is part of the organization’s mission to support HCCN collaboration. HCCNs that were unable to update their data will have another opportunity to do so following the official launch of the NRG this month, and Merge Studio is working to create a form that will simplify the process for HCCNs to keep their information up to date.

The timing of this latest release is fortuitous, given that the work that HCCNs do is especially critical during a time of upheaval in the health center world, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Reporting, interoperability, risk stratification, data collection and analysis are just a few areas in which HCCNs support health centers to function while they expand into new services like telehealth, seek alternative funding sources, or transition to value based payments.

We look forward to hearing about the future collaboration and partnership that the NRG will foster. We invite you to check out the new NRG website here or watch a video overview here. Let us know what you think!