Kristen Stine on the power of collaboration: The Solutions Center now, and what's next

Kristen Stine, Learning and Diffusion Manager, HealthTeamWorks

Kristen Stine leverages her background in training and organization development to synthesize HealthTeamWorks learnings into actionable tools and resources to support transformation. She previously served as a practice transformation strategist at the American Academy of Family Physicians and as training and development manager with TransforMED. At HealthTeamWorks, she develops and delivers new workforce development programs and serves as project lead for the Solutions Center membership platform.

Question: Why the Solutions Center? And why now?

Stine: Healthcare transformation is a collaborative effort. In most cases, it’s too big a lift for one person, or even one organization, to do on their own. HealthTeamWorks launched the Solutions Center as a financially feasible way for practices that aren’t engaged in a government-funded transformation opportunity to access more than just high-level information about transformation. They can use the interactive resources to really apply how-to guides and lessons we’ve learned, make them actionable for their organization, and continue to improve upon them.

Our transformation work has always started with the evidence. The Solutions Center combines the evidence from our experience and adds the richness of the community interaction to create boots-on-the-ground transformation activity. Because it’s a learning community supported by technology, it’s not stagnant. So we’re not just talking about what needs to be done. We’re collaborating with one another about how we’ve done it, and how to adapt the resources we’ve developed for other organizations.

Question: How does the Solutions Center align with HealthTeamWorks’ history of support for practice transformation?

Stine: We’ve learned that by convening groups together to learn, we learn more . The Solutions Center convenes people who have the same interests.

HealthTeamWorks actually started as the Colorado Clinical Guidelines Collaborative, a convener that brought together hospitals, employers, government agencies, quality improvement organizations, payers and providers to create evidence-based clinical guidelines. What we realized was that providers accessed the guidelines that resulted from that work, but they didn’t know how to implement them. That’s how HealthTeamWorks became a practice transformation organization. We developed and implemented the how-to, added the evidence and experience, and the Solutions Center is the next step in that work. We kicked off the idea of collaborative learning in January this year with our Solutions Center Interactive web events. These are a series of interactive expert panels and roundtable discussions focused on hot topics in healthcare transformation. We’re actually planning the 2019 calendar right now.

Question: What’s coming up next for Solutions Center?

Stine: We are continuously looking for ways to make the Solutions Center even more interactive, engaging, and impactful. We have many ideas in the pipeline, but members can also submit their ideas and suggestions. We’d love to hear from you.

We’ll be launching our peer discussion forums next, so people can reach out to their peers in this collaborative community to discuss resources, identify areas that still need development and work together for solutions.

We’re adding two new types of Solutions Center Interactive events,  industry updates to discuss the changes in legislation, payment models, and other overarching guidance that impact our clients; and learning labs, which will be facilitated virtual working sessions to help  clients who need a little extra transformation support, or who don’t have that support currently.

We’re also launching online learning modules and adding them to a sophisticated learning management platform. You’ll be able to  access bite-sized learning resources and customize learning paths for your team. You’ll also be able to see what others on your team are doing, too.