Background of the Case The organizations Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) had a long co-existence in the Boston health care market. Both the organizations have built up a good reputation and have solid accomplishments to add up to their credits. In many respects, both the organizations can be considered as rivals competing for patients, physicians, students and education programs, research funding, and clinical acumen. Even though the organizations have competing interests, one common aspect among them is the respect that each one carried for the other. Both of them recognized their strengths and differences. The interesting point in the merger of the two organizations is that the members of the two organizations had schooled together and had some existing collaborative arrangements for clinical, research, or educational programs. In December 1993, the two organizations united into one under the name and style of MGH/Brigham Health Care System Inc. After the lapse of a certain period of time, in 1994, the Boards of BWH and MGH accorded their approval to designate the MGH/Brigham Health Care System Inc as to the sole member of the corporation and renamed the organization as Partners Health Care System Inc. (PHCS). Organizational Structure There exists a number of ways in which collaboration between two organizations can be formed. One of the configurations is to form total integration of the two organizations to form an altogether new entity being a holding company. Under this concept, the two organizations retain their original identity. But they merge the support systems and the like to garner more negotiating power and efficiencies. This is the method adopted in the formation of Partners Health Care System Inc. With this concept, it was possible for both BWH and MGH to retain their original identity. Education and research programs were consolidated as the only consolidation of them would make sense. In order to accumulate more financial gains, support services were consolidated since such a move would provide more gains. The capital and operating budget processes were also consolidated to make them uniform, and all the information systems were made consistent in both organizations. Clinical Integration In any health care collaboration, clinical integration is considered to be a linchpin by many of the leading experts in the field. According to Boston Consulting Group (1994), when the consultants are brought to any newly merged organization, their advice would be to make a complete clinical integration as well as the consolidation of all respective support services. But in the case of PHCS, the organizational leaders did not go in for the option to integrate the clinical services. They had decided to integrate only a few programs. The programs were decided based on strong and defendable reasons only. Therefore PHCS decided to have a selective approach to clinical integration, and both the organization decided to retain complete clinical services at their respective sites. However, they decided to share the best practices at all sites for bringing improvement in clinical efficiency. However, the decision to remain selective was also made due to the reason that it was believed that both the organizations would remain