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Business Integration: How Can it Improve Process Efficiency in Healthcare?

By: Andrew Deen

 

Doctor talking to woman

Business integration is often referred to with the simpler term of merger. It refers to situations where two or more companies are united through a partnership or buyout.

The process can be extremely complicated. Each organization will have its own branding. It’s own employee protocol. Probably it’s own tech stack. Do you leave each corporation as it is? Distinct and autonomous? Or melt everything down into one mega-corporation? There is no one-size-fits-all answer. In this article, we take a look at different ways businesses can integrate and what each scenario requires.

We will also take a more specific look at what these situations can mean for healthcare organizations.

No Single Definition of Business Integration

As we touched on in the introduction, there is no single way that business integration has to go. Often when one company acquires another, the user-end experience remains basically the same. It is very normal for a customer of a business that has recently been integrated into another company to never notice the change.

Here’s an example. The print-on-demand companies Printify and Printful recently announced an integration. Both companies feature a broad range of unbranded products. Businesses can use these items with their existing designs or labels and sell them to consumers at a premium. Currently, this is being rolled out as a gentle merger. Both platforms have their own unique design templates. A business owner using Printify may not want to transfer all of their products over to Printful or vice versa.

However, customers now have access to both platforms’ products. Usually, the goal for any integration is to make the transition as seamless as possible both for employees and customers. Often, this means retaining aspects of individuality between the businesses being merged.

Internal Challenges

While mergers can be difficult for consumers most of the complications are felt internally. For employees, mergers can represent a new way of doing things. Internal processes are adjusted. Protocols change. It is difficult to overstate how challenging a technological l merger can be. If each business has its own text stack importing the data into a single source can involve years of work and hundreds of hours of training.

There are also sometimes casualties. For example, if both businesses have separate accounting departments—as they surely would—there will inevitably be a lot of personnel redundancies that will get ironed out.

Layoffs and high rates of turnover are very high during periods of integration.

Eventually, the integration will produce a stronger more profitable organization. However, that takes a lot of time money, money, and hard work.

For healthcare systems, these situations can be very challenging. You don’t want your hospital to be at reduced efficiency for even a day let alone the many months it can take to successfully navigate a complicated integration. Are these situations good for patients?

Yes!

Imagine a small hospital in Southern Illinois. Limited to one building, this healthcare institution sees thousands of patients within a moderate-sized Midwestern town. Just across the river in St. Louis, there is a much wider network of hospitals all operating under the same organization. This organization acquires the small, Southern Illinois hospital.

It is easy to imagine how inconvenient this could be for patients. Tech integration trouble. Potential communication barriers. Where once you could phone your doctor directly, now your calls are routed to a large customer service center in Arizona.

These are the downsides of any integration. Add to this the frustrations care providers are feeling as they try to learn the new system and it is natural to wonder if a big mistake has been made.

While growing pains will inevitably ensue, the benefits should eventually outweigh the cons when a healthcare merger is well executed. Patients will have a wide range of care options. Their information will be easily shared between specialists. Hospital administrators will have a much wider pool of data to use as they tweak their processes.

Internally, doctors and nursing leaders should also have better access to tools. The benefits will be particularly keen for people who had previously been working at the smaller hospital. Thanks to the merger they will have the resources of a much larger hospital at their disposal.

Conclusion

Integrations should—hopefully—wind up being a good thing. That doesn’t mean they are easy. In the healthcare setting, patients and care providers alike will need to adjust to the change. However, more resources and specialists are almost always better for the community they are serving in the long run.

The key ingredient is time. Eventually, things will work out for the better.

Published: December 5, 2024
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Andrew Deen

Andrew Deen has been a consultant for startups in almost every industry from retail to medical devices and everything in between. He implements lean methodology and is currently writing a book about scaling up business. Twitter @AndrewDeen14.

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