ReThink Health Research
Activities
Collaborative capacity in communities. Some initiatives have as a starting point a diverse leadership team that has at least begun to build sufficient trust to explore acting collaboratively. However, the opposite may also be true: community leadership teams can act in ways that destroy relationships, erode trust, and burnout collaborative capacity. To understand the positive and negative events and conditions that create or undermine collaborative capacity, ReThink Health Research is undertaking to explore the conditions under which community leadership groups are able to build effective collaborations and undertake increasingly challenging efforts together over time. Drawing on research in social psychology, economics, political science and related fields, a team of scholars is building a predictive model that identifies the antecedents and processes by which collaborative capacity grows – and also the events and conditions that result in less collaborative effort, stuckness or incapacity to identify or accomplish shared purposes. Among other things, the resulting insights and tools will better enable leaders to determine readiness for action and make more informed choices about investing resources in first developing collaborative capacity or in moving more directly to complex system interventions.
Case archive for health care change leaders. Leaders transform systems through a process of “bricolage,” the cobbling together of unique and appropriate solutions out of other models that may be imperfect or particular to a setting but have nonetheless been proven successful. To do this more effectively, leaders therefore need a set of models from which to learn: a set of quality cases about innovations taking place around the United States – organized by the underlying goal of the innovation and containing sufficient and useful descriptive detail about the challenges and barriers that leaders faced and how they overcame them. ReThink Health Research is undertaking to create such a set of cases, drawing on and enhancing existing published regional examples, as well as conducting new research. The goal is to create a usable tool for working leaders seeking to transform their systems.
Organizing for Health action-research. ReThink Health’s Organizing for Health project in South Carolina is an exploration of what community organizing can bring to the transformation of health and health care. It has a specific research component, focused on understanding and supporting the capacities of local teams of leaders – payers, patients, providers and administrators – to make real and lasting impact in the community. Assisted by a new health database tool adapted from the Obama campaign by NationalField, the research seeks to track the process and outcomes of organizing campaigns, distance learning, and trainings on community leadership capacity, care delivery and, as possible, health, care and cost. The research will also contribute to developing innovative training tools and case studies that offer leaders and organizers insight and assistance for achieving health system innovation and change.
Leadership team strategic capacity. Creating a sustainable health system hinges on the ability of leadership teams from diverse parts of a community to make excellent strategic and tactical choices about how to best use limited resources for lasting impact. Leadership teams vary tremendously in their ability to use knowledge together to develop coherent, collaborative, and organized efforts. To help address this challenge, ReThink Health Research is working with the New Organizing Institute, a not for profit organization, to study team strategizing. This project, funded by NOI, is a systematic examination of the behavioral patterns of excellent and struggling leadership teams and the patterns that enhance or undermine their ability to develop meaningful shared strategy. From this work will come both an evaluation tool for assessing leadership teams and a self-assessment and development process to enable leadership teams to more effectively work together.
Evaluation of community change efforts. Members of Rethink Health are deeply engaged with a range of communities across the United States – from Manchester, NH, to Pueblo, CO. Each project – whether successful or not – has the potential to serve other communities by providing evaluation data about both the processes and the impact of the activities in which the communities are engaged. By evaluating on a range of measures, from community capacity to net costs of health care in the system, ReThink Health Research will undertake to develop and disseminate a high quality, rigorous, systematic and shared set of evaluation practices for assessing the outcomes of all ReThink Health regional engagements.