Competing health care systems and complex patients: An inter-professional collaboration to improve outcomes and reduce health care costs

High-need, high-frequency patients overutilize acute care services, a pattern of behavior associated with many poor outcomes that disproportionately contributes to US healthcare costs. Our objective was to reduce healthcare costs while improving clinical outcomes through optimizing healthcare delivery and inter-professional collaboration for complex patients. To do so, we partnered with a competing health care system to address fragmentation in the patients' plans of care contributing to patterns of high utilization. Our collaborative approach was associated with a reduction in healthcare utilization and costs for this population, as well as an increase in operating margin. Collaboration between neighboring competing health systems that share a select group of complex patients is an effective way to stabilize care, decrease health care system overutilization, improve healthcare delivery, and reduce the costs of associated care. Our intervention model provides a useful model for inter-organizational collaboration in healthcare.