By collaborating with and complementing our competition, our customers, and our suppliers, we can enhance our collective position in the overall health care market. This will allow us to deliver high-quality wound care services and develop products that demonstrate added value to our patients. Wound care organizations can gear up for this challenge by setting agendas that will coincide with the education, public policy, research, and technology transfer issues that must be addressed as we move toward quality care. This process of learning to compete, collaborate, and complement must take place at the grassroots and the national levels, and it can be facilitated by open discussions. However, barriers to this fledgling effort are thrown up when the discussions turn to agreement over who's in control, who makes the profit, who keeps their job, who gets the recognition, and what organization becomes subsumed in various mergers and acquisitions.
Practitioners often work in competition with one another and at cross-purposes.
Wound care teams may focus on single patients or groups of patients. This collective effort of the team presumably brings benefits to the patient and the health care organization, and it is readily reimbursed by third-party payers. This model calls for individuals to work across disciplines, industries, and functions to ensure market share and economies of scale. The transformation of the health care industry in general and wound care specifically will demand that practitioners leave behind the multidisciplinary model and adopt this new way of practicing. It has the potential to transform wound care into a concept that will work across all disciplines.