Collaboration between life sciences companies and the broader healthcare ecosystem is one of the four areas where Vintura works with life sciences organisations. It is where the shift from product supplier to system partner becomes operational: in care pathways, clinical networks, evidence-building, and the shared accountability that turns intention into measurable impact.
The Trust Skills behind the Partnership
The shift is fundamentally relational
For a pharma company, the traditional logic is straightforward: develop a differentiated innovation, prove it outperforms current treatments, and bring it to market. This logic rewards competition. Partnership requires something different: sharing information, acknowledging limitations, and working alongside people you would previously have called clients or competitors. That is a genuinely uncomfortable shift, and it is the core reason why value-based partnerships remain more discussed than delivered.
The biggest obstacle is the mindset change – shifting from competing with others to making them genuine discussion partners. That means exposing yourself firstly, and then influencing others, which is harder than it sounds.
Karst-Jan de Jong – Partner at Vintura
What gets in the way on both sides of the table. The barriers to value-based partnerships are not one-sided. They exist within pharma companies, within healthcare ecosystems, and within the infrastructure that connects them. What are the challenges we face;
Within pharma
The posture problem
Pharma companies are structured and incentivised to compete. Becoming a partner requires a willingness to share, to listen, and to accept that the outcome matters more than who gets credit for it. Many organisations understand this intellectually. In practice, far fewer have made the structural and cultural changes to live it.
The outcome vs. sales logic
Local and regional teams often do want to pursue genuine partnerships. The barrier is that these activities are not justifiable to headquarters when they do not directly translate into product sales. Enabling partnerships requires flexibility to invest in outcomes that sit outside immediate commercial return, and most organisational structures do not allow for that.
The trust issue with the pharma label
Pharma companies will always carry a label that comes with accumulated scepticism, built over decades of transactional engagement, even when their intentions are genuinely collaborative. External stakeholders are rightly cautious, not of the individuals but of what the label represents. Trust must be built, not assumed, and it takes considerably more time and consistency than most companies anticipate.
Inside the healthcare system
The silo incentive problem
Value-based partnerships require a long-term, cross-organisational logic: investing in outcomes that benefit the broader healthcare system. Current healthcare financing works in the opposite direction, organised around departmental budgets and short-term volume metrics. Saving costs for another department’s budget does not benefit your own. Delivering outcomes that benefit the broader system does not translate into incentive for the team that generated them. These siloed incentives create a fundamental contradiction that works directly against the logic value-based partnerships require.
The care pathway gap
When care involves multiple specialists, settings, or institutions, the transitions between them frequently break down. Healthcare professionals operate within the boundaries of their own remit and stop there, without a guaranteed handover for where the patient should go next. Patients fall through gaps that exist not because of negligence, but because the pathway was never designed as a continuous, end-to-end whole.
The data infrastructure problem
Value-based partnerships depend on the ability to measure outcomes, which depends on data. In most healthcare systems, patient data remains siloed across institutions and cannot flow properly between them. In some markets, the infrastructure to collect it consistently does not yet exist. You cannot measure what you cannot capture, and without a shared data foundation, even the most well-intentioned partnership lacks the evidence base to demonstrate its impact or justify its continuation.
A clinician might say: my remit ends here. And what happens to the patient after that, whether they reach the right next step in their care, is rarely something they can ensure.”
Our Approach
Finding the common ground and building from there.
Genuine collaboration does not require stakeholders to deprioritise their own interests. It requires identifying where those interests overlap, and building a shared direction from that foundation. Vintura’s role is to make that common ground visible to all parties, so the work of partnership can begin on honest terms.
Map the care pathway as it actually is
The starting point is always an honest picture of the current reality as patients actually experience it: the care pathway gaps, the siloed handovers, and the points where the pathway simply ends without a clear next step. You cannot redesign what you have not honestly mapped.
Identify genuine shared interests across parties
Stakeholders entering a partnership with different roles do not need identical interests to collaborate effectively. What they need is enough common ground to move in the same direction. Vintura surfaces that ground: understanding what each party genuinely needs, where those needs converge, and making the overlap visible to all parties simultaneously so that a shared direction can form.
Build trust through neutral ground
Pharma companies carry their label into every room they enter, and with it the associated trust issue. Even where intentions are genuinely collaborative, the credibility to lead the conversation is not always there. As an independent facilitator that understands both the pharma and the healthcare world, Vintura creates a neutral space where all perspectives are heard equally and no single party’s interests dominate the agenda. Trust is built incrementally, through consistent and transparent engagement.
Design how success will be measured from the start
A partnership without shared metrics is a collaboration without accountability. Defining how impact will be measured for patients, for the healthcare system, and for the company must happen before the partnership begins. Shared metrics are what turn good intentions into evidence of change.
Pharma will always carry the pharma label, and with it the trust issues, even when they don’t want it. Having an independent third party with no own agenda, working only for the greater good, creates genuinely neutral ground.
What Good Looks Like
You achieve something you couldn’t have done alone.
For the patient
Care that follows the evidence, regardless of postcode. Every patient treated according to the latest clinical guidelines. No more falling through the gaps between care providers.
For the healthcare system
Innovation and accessibility in better balance. A sustainable system that can deliver the best available care and remain affordable with available resources. Value-based partnerships that are well-designed and well-measured contribute directly to that balance.
For your company
When partnership works, companies move beyond the limits of the product-supplier role. They gain access to evidence, relationships, and decision-making arenas that were previously out of reach. What once felt like dead ends become navigable, and that advantage compounds over time.
In theory, value-based healthcare is this future great world where everybody else changes. In reality, things will also change for you. You might realise you are not the best-performing actor in the field. There are things you would have to let go of. And short-term, things might actually get more difficult before they get better.
Let’s talk
Ready to build partnerships that go beyond the advisory board?
Whether you are designing a care pathway improvement, building a clinical network, or trying to make stakeholders with genuinely different interests work toward a shared goal, the best starting point is a conversation. Karst-Jan de Jong, Bas Amesz, Silvia Rohr, and Rianne Ernst lead Vintura’s value-based partnerships work. Reach out directly, or share where you are and we will take it from there.
