New IHI CEO Urges ‘Intentional Collaboration’ at Forum Keynote

By Jay Kumar

In the opening keynote address of the 2025 IHI Forum, new Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) President and CEO Sylvia Trent-Adams, PhD, RN, told attendees that “intentional collaboration” and partnerships are crucial for healthcare leaders to overcome the many challenges before them.

In a chat with IHI President Emerita and Senior Fellow Maureen Bisognano, Trent-Adams emphasized the need for leaders to collaborate.

“This concept of intentional collaboration is about knowing why you want to get together in a partnership and finding that mutual benefit for all parties for the ultimate gain of improving health and healthcare for the world,” she said.

Now in its 37^th year, the IHI Forum is hosting more than 2,400 healthcare leaders, clinicians, patient advocates, and quality improvement professionals from around the world.

Trent-Adams said there are many ongoing challenges with the global healthcare landscape.

“I am very concerned about the global context. Across the world, I see the cost of care increasing. We have poor access in so many areas and at the same time, we’re struggling with the quality that we are delivering and how we improve that,” she said. “But we see some trends, such as a growing aging population—a huge challenge for us. I know that there are many workforce issues that we’re all dealing with in many countries.”

This is where the need for collaboration comes in, Trent-Adams noted.

“There’s a bright spot, in that there are opportunities to build intentional collaboration where we’re thinking about how we want to partner and how we build those opportunities to come together, how to think about solutions and how to be able measure success over time,” she said.

This also means focusing on patient needs.

“I think IHI has a beautiful way of bringing people together, and I want to do that on a larger scale and bring others to the table as relates to patients,” Trent-Adams noted. “The plenary we had last night was a good example of how we should be working with our community to bring patients to the table, find our voice, find a way to influence policy and drive decision-making from the ground up. We’ve created systems and we’ve created models but a lot of them really are not serving our patients or our providers and clinicians very well. I think that is an area where IHI can be a part of that solution.”

Including patients is paramount to creating real change.

“The voice of the patient is absolutely critical to the redesign of healthcare and shifting that balance of power so it’s not professionals doing things for people but really creating a sense of collaboration and redesign is so powerful” said Bisognano, who mentioned the ancient concept of eudaimonia, which she defined as the state of humans flourishing.

“We’ve been so focused on the healthcare buildings and processes. I think it’s time to expand our vision to communities and patients and really create not only a better healthcare system but a better health system,” she added. “I think that really our job in healthcare today is not just to take care of people when they’re sick but to really create human flourishing for all of us and we can’t do that in the walls of a healthcare organization. It’s all of us together.”

Trent-Adams advised the leaders in the audience to work on building community.

“We’re in this together and the more we can find community, collaboration, and those common areas where we can support each other, I think the better off we’ll all be,” she said. “There are so many tensions right now, whether it be the geopolitical space, the tensions around staffing, being able to cover the cost of all the services that we need to deliver, or more importantly, how patients are dealing with the some of the tragedies and being able to access care and pay for it. We have to find space where we can come together, understand the other’s position. There’s a lot of forces that are creating those silos amongst all of us and we’ve got to break down those silos.”

This collaboration needs to go beyond healthcare, Trent-Adams said.

“I think we are not going to get the progress we want if we continue to look at this only in the healthcare sector. We need everybody in the entire community, and I don’t mean the outpatient clinic. I don’t mean the GPs. I mean the entire community,” she added.

“It’s also people who are making decisions. Bring the politicians to the table, bring the transportation secretaries to the table, and bring all those individuals in the community who need a space to have that voice. That’s why I think IHI has an opportunity to create that change.”