Transforming Healthcare Through Negotiation

Negotiation skills are an essential part of the healthcare practice. Physicians, healthcare administrators, and other professionals must understand how to advocate for their priorities and balance the competing interests of saving lives and patient safety with revenue and existing insurance or supply chain contracts. This process must occur in tandem with navigating the novel challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and changing healthcare regulations. Transforming Negotiations in Healthcare: The HEAR Approach offers a transformative negotiation approach developed for anyone negotiating in the healthcare space. The HEAR approach is premised on the belief that the practice of medicine, the business of health, and the delivery of care require a nuanced and balanced set of negotiation skills not widely addressed in the currently available negotiation literature. Unlike traditional business negotiations, healthcare is not solely transactional. Thus, attempts to graft traditional business negotiation strategies and tactics into negotiations related to the delivery of care and practice of medicine are inappropriate and insufficient. Effectiveness in healthcare or negotiations is inextricably linked to the same thing – the quality of human interaction. The HEAR approach empowers parties to engage in a more productive negotiation process by providing negotiators with tools to develop the skills to strategically incorporate and leverage the relational aspects that underpin most situations within healthcare. Through this relational orientation, HEAR provides a mechanism to change the nature of the negotiation by identifying opportunities for transformative shifts – the moments during the negotiation where parties reach new understandings of their situation and each other. In this space, we offer strategies for the parties to work together and reimagine the goal of the negotiation and successfully reach a mutually agreeable outcome. Rooted in real-world examples, Transforming Negotiations in Healthcare: The HEAR Approach provides a step-by-step process for preparing for and engaging in the complexities of healthcare negotiations. In addition, this book provides readers with the tools to develop a special skill set suited to healthcare and any situation that encompasses the relational aspects of human communication, such as the workplace or one’s personal life.