Watch the full webinar, “Collaboration Over Competition: Charting a New Path to Better Patient Care,” above.
The health care industry is ripe with opportunities for organizations to partner, from pipeline programs that aim to bolster the workforce to data-sharing initiatives that spread institutional knowledge far and wide. But at a recent Newsweek virtual event, health system leaders disagreed about whether this collaborative spirit is sustainable long-term.
The webinar, “Collaboration Over Competition: Charting a New Path to Better Patient Care,” took place on January 15. An expert panel, including Dr. Corey Casper (chief research officer at Banner Health), Jeffrey Flaks (president and CEO of Hartford HealthCare) and Robert Stone (CEO of City of Hope), spoke to and took questions from an audience of health care decision-makers.
Throughout the discussion, leaders were largely aligned on the benefits of partnerships. They noted how collaborative efforts have helped hospitals scale innovation, expand care access and further complex disease research. By working together, health systems are also able to weather public health crises—like COVID-19 and the swine flu—more effectively, the speakers said.
But when asked whether partnerships would remain selective and strategic or become a default operating model for health systems in the future, the three panelists expressed different opinions.
Flaks, who leads Hartford HealthCare in Connecticut, took an optimistic position on collaboration, saying, “I think we’re going to see more and more of it.”
With the rapid advancement of new technologies, health systems have a growing rolodex of innovators to partner with. Flaks pointed to Hartford HealthCare’s partnerships with Abridge, which provides AI-powered ambient scribing technology to lighten clinicians’ documentation workloads, and K Health, which offers 24/7 virtual care. It would be challenging for individual health systems to stand up these programs on their own.
“Every provider-based organization should look to extend its capabilities and get better by virtue of aligning with these different types of new approaches and organizations that extend our ability to make health care better,” Flaks said.
“We’re going to see more and more innovation, [which is] going to stimulate more partnership activity, more collaborations,” he continued. “The end result [is that] health care is getting better every day…two, three, four, five years from now, it’s going to be tremendous.”
Stone, who sits at the helm of California-based specialty cancer center City of Hope, said he agreed that collaboration would likely increase into the future. But he “gently disagreed” that it will “automatically become the default way of going forward.”
“The reality is that most health systems today are under intense day-to-day pressure,” Stone said. “And in that environment, in my experience, leaders gravitate toward what they know they can deliver and what they can control.”
That tendency is “not about ego,” Stone clarified, continuing, “When the stakes are this high, many organizations believe that the safest choice is to choose incremental progress over shared risk.”
The result may be partnerships in name, but not in practice, Stone said. True collaborations would require leaders to accept more complexity than they tend to be comfortable with—and to do so under increasingly uncertain circumstances.
“I hope Jeff [Flaks] is right, and I’m wrong on this,” Stone said, “…but partnerships [are] only going to scale when leaders are intentionally ready to do the work differently.”
Casper, who leads research efforts at Phoenix-based Banner Health, married the two perspectives by alluding to one of his favorite studies.
“If you take rats and put them in a cage, and they have plenty of food and water, they are docile, gentle animals that get along with each other,” Casper said. “If you start putting more of them in the cage and you start limiting the amount of resources they have, they start fighting with each other.”
In the current health care environment, there are more organizations vying for patient preference, limited talent and dwindling resources, he said: “So if we were rats, we would start biting each other.”
“But we’re not rats,” he continued, “and we have an incredible set of new tools and new technologies that strive to bring us together as a group.”
While Casper acknowledged “innate” impediments to collaboration, he expressed optimism that health systems can fulfill their “obligation” to work together.
“I think that we have a nature to not collaborate at times when resources are constrained,” he said. “But I think we’re better than that.”
This event was part of a series of Newsweek webinars that will take place throughout 2026, addressing the most critical issues facing health care—including financial pressures, workforce strain, rapid technological change and shifting patient demands.
Click here to register for Newsweek’s January 22 webinar, “Wearables: What’s the ROI For Health Systems?” featuring leaders from Northwell Health, WHOOP and Withings.
Click here to register for Newsweek’s February 3 webinar, “Preventing Chronic Disease Patients From Falling Through the Cracks,” featuring leaders from Cleveland Clinic, Endeavor Health, OURA and Sutter Health.
