Bassett Healthcare Network partnering insights

- So, how would you say that this relationship is, is different from either prior relation, vendor relationships that either Basset's had or you've experienced in the past?

- You know, we certainly had explored the opportunity of, you know, looking outward and bringing in multiple vendors to, to create, probably, you know, what would have been a similar sort of arrangement. Having said that though, to find a single solution in an organization with as much depth as much experience, you know, with it, with an advanced and, and very, I would say good reputation in each of these capabilities is quite hard to find. And as we piece this together, as we saw the value proposition of having a backbone, an organization that can bring so much innovation and technology and support and expertise in one partner really was important for us to explore and I'm happy that we did.

- And your employees are obviously a big central focus of the relationship and 95 plus percent of them are moving over to Optum as part of this relationship. How, how big of a driver of the relationship was that for you and for the vast organization overall?

- Yeah, I mean, I can't underscore enough how important that was, you know, going into this, you know, particularly in an environment like ours, small communities that we serve, you know, the question of how are our people going to be impacted was central to all of this. I think as we went through this process very collaboratively through the due diligence, you know, Mike, very well, that, that was a question that, you know, was appropriately positioned by our board, appropriately positioned by our leadership team, and one that we continually dwelled on, you know, invested a ton of time to ensure that we were doing this the right way for our people.

- To back up for a second. I think one of the the things I come across is a lot of folks are in system CEOs like yourself, are a little reluctant to enter into these types of relationships is a lot of a significant relationships. Most a lot of employees and personnel, and can be quite a long process to work through. Talk to us a little bit about the timeline and just how that transpired from your initial interest in doing something like this, to you know where we are today.

- Totally, I think the entire due diligence process, as well as through our negotiations took about nine or 10 months. It felt comfortable throughout the entire time. I think the best advice I would give to anyone sort of exploring this, is to engage very early with your board and make sure that we pull in the appropriate representation from that perspective. But also, I think one of the best things that we did that helped accelerate the timeline was to pull in our leadership early on. And I'm talking about the leaders that were, overseeing these key functions on the Bassett side prior to their transition. Their buy-in, their expertise, their support for this conversation was absolutely critical in this. And without question there were some early concerns and, you know, reservations. But as we continued you know cultivating relationship, as we continue due diligence process, you know often being open to and available to us to answer a lot of questions that we had. We were able to really accelerate the conversation. And I think, well, I know we landed in a very, very good place with 95% of our leaders and people transitioning over. So, you know, could we have done it faster? Maybe, but I think it was a very comfortable timeframe and looking back now, I think it was very successful and well thought out designed land.