For the first session of the afternoon, following lunch and the posters session, I thought I would sit on the presentation by Diane Skiba and Michele Norton titled ‘Creating partnerships to share intellectual and social capital’.
Among other activities, Diane is involved with the Informatics Collaboratory - see, for example, http://www.nursingworld.org/ojin/topic30/tpc30_4.htm
Michelle outlined some of the impetuses towards collaborative partnerships among, for example, hospitals, academic institutions, and vendors. These include various IOM reports, workforce shortages, and limited academic resources and funding. Benefits she sees include preparing clinicians for the future in terms of, for example, evidence-based practice and IT, in enhancing patient safety, in industry access to academic intellectual and social capital, research collaboration, and contributions to ongoing product design and innovation.
Among examples, Michelle cited some current academic-industry partnerships, including University of Kansas/Cerner (SEEDS project - Simulated E-hEalth Delivery System -http://www2.kumc.edu/son/abp.html), Johns Hopkins University/Eclipsys, and University of Colorado Denver HSC/McKesson, as wll as past examples such as the HBOC Nurse Scholar Program of the 1980’s/90’s.
In the second part of the presentation, Diane kicked off with an interactive exercise to get attendees to look at issues around developing proposals for partnerships. She asked people to think about organisational assets, goals for proposed partnerships, identification of existing intellectual and social capital, and what the next steps might be.
Among factors identified by Diane from her experience were barriers and issues/opportunities, including:
approaches to problem identification and prioritisation (whether there is agreement, prioritisation if there are multiple problems, formal structures and hierarchies, a focus on weaknesses rather than strengths);
values (eg different demands related to career advancement, suspicion and bias, styles of interactions);
work styles (socialisation of scholars as independent thinkers has effects, including uncertainty, ‘expert’ syndrome);
time demands (effective collaboration requires immersion, time to build trust);
approaches/mindsets to information, including ‘publish or perish’, intellectual property issues, and dissemination of information.
Among strategies for successful partnerships, Diane suggests partnering at the highest level, ensuring the right match, contractual areements (eg Memoranda of Understanding), commitment and accountability.
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