Emily Moorhead, president of the Macomb market at Detroit-based Henry Ford Health, spent her first year building a foundation — strengthening quality metrics, deepening physician partnerships and improving financial performance. The growth question she’s now putting to her leadership team doesn’t start with service lines or market share. She knows the Macomb market can’t serve every community need on its own, and trying to is a mistake.
“In many cases, our communities need more access, more coordination, more creativity, not necessarily more duplication,” Ms. Moorhead said during a recent “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast” interview. “Sometimes that greatest impact can come through collaboration.”
That means approaching organizations historically called competitors differently — a shift that an increasing number of health system leaders are weighing as financial pressures and access gaps make collaboration more practical than competition.
The case for collaboration isn’t theoretical. Mr. Moorhead’s first year applied it concretely. The Macomb community has substantial resources through nonprofits, the public health department and the local mental health authority — capacity that goes underutilized when patients can’t find it and health systems aren’t actively connecting them to it.
“In my first year here, I’ve really been pleasantly surprised by how many resources this community has through nonprofits, through [the] public health department, through the mental health authority,” she said. “Those are the kinds of partnerships that I’m looking to enhance and make sure that that coordination piece is there. Because if the average person doesn’t know they’re there, and we’re not helping them access that, then those resources are going to waste and they’re not being utilized appropriately.”
The reorientation extends to where care should happen at all. Ms. Moorhead is prioritizing site-of-care navigation, steering patients toward urgent care, primary care or freestanding emergency departments rather than hospital emergency departments when the situation doesn’t require it. She is also focused on advancing minimally invasive procedures and precision medicine models that improve recovery times and reduce unnecessary inpatient stays.
“I think our greatest opportunity is really to redefine what growth even means,” Ms. Moorhead said. “I’m challenging our leadership team that we have to look beyond traditional measures of growth and start asking some deeper questions around where is the disease prevalence increasing, where are access issues creating delays or gaps in care, and where can we start partnering with others to better serve the community.”
The long-term bet is that organizations willing to collaborate on access — sharing care with nonprofits, public health agencies and former competitors — will ultimately serve communities more effectively than those that try to capture every patient.
“It has to be centered on helping patients receive the right care at the right place at the right time,” she said. “It really requires us to think differently about organizations we’ve historically called competitors.”
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