The Benefits of Teamwork

If you attend national conferences at which addiction treatment centers tend to exhibit, chances are you will come across Massachusetts' AdCare Hospital and Illinois' Rosecrance Health Network at adjoining booths, or perhaps sharing the same space. Neither the luck of the draw nor a scheduling difficulty has anything to do with it.

“This gives me a colleague I can talk to,” says James McKenna, vice president of marketing and development at the Worcester-based AdCare. “That has saved me from having to pay a retainer for a marketing consultant. What's that worth?”

The small handful of treatment organizations that are engaged in partnerships with other centers cite many factors essential to a successful effort, including commitment at the top level of leadership, a knowledge of which business topics should remain off limits in the relationship, a common mission and philosophy of service, and a lack of direct competition between the organizations. The partnerships that are thriving are notable for their informality—even the phrase “handshake agreement” may overstate how much of this work tends to be formalized.

“It's based on trust,” Caron Treatment Centers President and CEO Douglas Tieman says of his organization's frequent work with the Betty Ford Center and Tieman's longtime friend, its President and CEO John Schwarzlose. “John will call me, and I'll call him. Neither of us would take advantage of each other. There is a good spirit of our efforts being mutually beneficial.”

Cooperative marketing

The joint marketing work between AdCare and Rosecrance grew out of the relationship the two agencies' CEOs had forged through their work with the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers (NAATP). McKenna began having discussions with Janis Waddell, the Rockford, Ill.-based Rosecrance's vice president of marketing, and soon the two were planning a retreat involving each organization's entire marketing staff.

“Jim and I started at the higher level and then we took it one step further, to involve our whole staff,” says Waddell. She considers the communication and sharing of ideas highly desirable in an environment where no one really knows if a certain marketing strategy will work until it is tested. “You have to try a lot of different strategies today,” she says, and sometimes working with another organization will help determine more definitively whether a certain approach can work.

The two organizations have shared use of television ads that differ only in the name of the treatment agency shown on the screen. Both organizations are tied into the same toll-free hotline for people seeking alcohol treatment for themselves or a loved one (800-ALCOHOL). The arrangement works because the organizations serve different regional markets and to a degree offer a different mix of services. For instance, AdCare has been able to refer adolescent clients from the Northeast to Rosecrance because AdCare does not offer adolescent treatment.

Also, the arrangement gives each agency another set of eyes for identifying possible business contacts. “A friend of mine who was the EAP for an airline in my area was able to help make a contact for Janis at the same airline in her area,” McKenna says.

The two organizations often pool their efforts at professional conferences, either by reserving adjacent booth spaces or sharing one space and helping promote each other's services to attendees. At a recent NAATP meeting, Waddell and McKenna joined with a Betty Ford Center official to present a marketing seminar. They warned attendees in advance that they would be asked to break into small groups during the session and share ideas, but Waddell says the 35 participants were receptive to working together and gave the presentation favorable evaluations.

McKenna says it is good to see some indications of a willingness to discuss business issues among organizations. “There really are not many secrets out there, but still people don't share as much as they could,” he says.

Waddell believes treatment agencies can build the kind of relationship Rosecrance has with AdCare without losing any competitive edge. She refers to the hybrid phenomenon she'd like to see more of in the field as “co-op-etition.”

Teaming up for advocacy

The Betty Ford Center and Caron Treatment Centers have engaged in a number of joint projects over the years, including sponsorship of a conference on women's treatment (Hazelden also co-sponsored that event with Betty Ford and Caron in the past). Schwarzlose and Tieman have the same type of informal relationship that high-level officials at AdCare and Rosecrance enjoy, and that can lead to discussions of any number of possible joint ventures.

This year, the two organizations pooled their efforts to establish a Web site intended to spur action on long-stalled federal parity legislation for mental health and substance abuse treatment. The site, referred to as “Equal Coverage for Addiction Treatment Now” (accessible at https://www.ECATNOW.org), seeks to educate and mobilize the public regarding the Paul Wellstone Mental Health Equitable Treatment Act, for which no substantive action has been taken since the spring of 2005.

“It would have been easy to have given up on parity,” Schwarzlose says. “But when you realize that this is about people being discriminated against, why wouldn't you do anything you could to counteract that?”

Tieman believes the Betty Ford Center's participation in this cause certainly has given the Web site and its mission the kind of visibility that even a large facility such as Caron could not achieve by itself. A press event for the site's launch included appearances by Reps. Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island and Jim Ramstad of Minnesota, the lead sponsors of the House's version of comprehensive parity legislation.

Schwarzlose explains, “Our concern when we have a brand name like the Betty Ford Center is that we have got to protect that. Over 90 percent of the general public knows our name.” Still, he has no qualms whatsoever about positioning that name directly next to Caron's.

“It's a no-brainer for me to collaborate with Caron,” he says. “We believe they are as much like us as any program around. If one of our staff members or one of my family members needed treatment, they of course couldn't come to the Betty Ford Center. Caron is at the top of our list of places where we would want to send them.”

Keys to success

Common values and enough geographic or program separation between facilities are often cited among treatment facility leaders as essential elements in making partnerships work.

Tieman, who says Caron also engages in partnership activity locally with both a smaller rehabilitation facility and much larger health systems, says the agency looks for compatibility in mission and treatment philosophy. He adds that it is important to identify projects where organizations working together would experience the kind of synergistic benefits that wouldn't accrue from pursuing a project alone. “Organizations shouldn't partner just for the sake of partnering. They need goals,” he says.

Yet both Tieman and Schwarzlose say they see little evidence of significant partnership activity between centers in today's marketplace, and that has both leaders somewhat concerned.

“I've been surprised that when new CEOs come into this field, they want to protect their turf. They want to get the upper hand and be in a competitive mode,” Schwarzlose says. “When I see the national statistics that say that 85 percent of the men and women who need help never get it, I think, ‘How can we be in competition?’”

Tieman even believes there was significantly more evidence of cooperation during the late 1990s as the treatment field began to emerge from a period of weak financial performance and get healthy again. Since conditions improved and new entrants to the field emerged, he sees more of a competitive position being adopted.

“I think that there is a concern about differentiation; organizations have become overly cautious,” Tieman says. “They're afraid that if they work together they won't be able to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack.”

Judging from Tieman's outlook on this issue, it may take a while to see significant change in center leaders' behavior. “People will want to partner with people they know, and with the new entrants in the field, we don't know these people and they don't know us.”