Innovative Healthcare Collaboration: Danish-Indian partnership

Hospitals, faced by strong demands for high quality, efficient care, increasingly have to collaborate and coordinate their work with external stakeholders. This represents a wicked problem because it is cross-cutting, unstructured and relentless. Recent research shows that innovative solutions to wicked problems are likely to emerge under extreme constraints. To that end, this network activity aims to bring Indian and Danish hospital researchers together in three thematic workshops: (a) “A theoretical and empirical review of innovative healthcare collaboration (IHC)”. In the first Indian workshop researchers will present findings about challenges related to IHC from interviews, previous experiences, literature reviews as well as obtain feedback from Indian hospital professionals and managers; (b) “Towards an IHC model”. By building on the first workshop and more empirical studies, this workshop in Denmark will use draft research reports developed by the research team to discuss and validate testable propositions about IHC, where Danish hospital professionals and managers will provide insights; and (c) “Advancing the IHC model”. This workshop uses the proposi-tions from workshop two to develop research proposals involving the two project partners. Indian and Danish hospitals are selected because they are telling as regards IHC: Indian hospitals have to provide low cost care to large populations living in geographically big areas by pushing the boundaries of external collaboration and; Danish hospitals have to develop IHC that involves other sectors like municipalities in order to, for example, provide care to an aging population with multiple chronic diseases. The researchers come from the Center for Industrial Production, Aalborg University and the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow. Their field of expertise is, respectively, hospital collaboration and coordination and hospital operations management and supply chains. Both groups also have ongoing research collaboration with hospitals. That bilateral collaboration, thus, provides a strong backdrop for researching IHC.