Financial pressures continue to mount across healthcare, with many providers and payers running deficits and uncertain about business model sustainability. According to health policy expert Dr. Thomas Lee, now Chief Medical Officer at Press Ganey, cost reduction alone cannot be healthcare’s long-term strategy. Instead, organizations should focus on building social capital—the networks of trust, teamwork, and collaboration—to improve both efficiency and quality while redesigning care and applying artificial intelligence.
Lee identifies three types of social capital as essential for healthcare efficiency. Horizontal “bridging” connections allow managers and leaders to learn from colleagues doing similar work within and outside their organizations, accelerating the spread of innovations. Adjacent “bridging” connections involve direct conversations between teams about how they create efficiency through collaboration—expanding the sense of shared purpose among healthcare workers. Vertical “bridging,” or alignment, requires frontline workers to trust that senior leadership shares their values and has sound plans reflecting those values, which managers must actively support through communication rather than undermining through criticism.
“Bonding” connections within teams create the psychological safety that enables employees to speak up about safety concerns when new efficiency models are proposed. Building social capital through these approaches improves safety, quality, patient experience, and employee retention while also enhancing operational efficiency. Lee emphasizes that value-based care—focused on improving patient outcomes and then optimizing efficiency—requires integration of care. Organizations that build trust, teamwork, and reliable collaboration patterns will be better positioned to survive financial pressures and thrive. He suggests managers should approach social capital development “with the same intensity and discipline as CFOs use when managing the finances of their organizations.”
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://hitconsultant.net/2026/01/21/healthcare-strategy-social-capital-efficiency-vs-cost-cutting/