What is Integration?
GUVIST facilitates service integration to improve the experience of people who receive services from multiple organizations by helping service providers operate interdependently by design. Integration of partner organizations can be achieved in the following ways:
Leadership:
Developing sustainable relationships through GUVIST opens communication between organizations and builds trust and leadership support for long-term commitment to achieve both short and long-term goals.
Decision-making:
Though GUVIST organizations remain autonomous, they commit to identifying overlaps and gaps between missions, uncovering duplication and fragmentation. Problem solving these inefficiencies is achieved through shared decisions to create a common agenda, mutually reinforce activities, assess, pool and leverage available funds, share data tracking and measurement, and include those with lived experience at the right time.
Operations:
Integration of operations means that organizations function interdependently by design. This requires challenging assumptions about how the system currently operates, and community members’ experience with the system, and identifying infrastructure and processes that intentionally disrupt the status quo. Over time this creates the desirability of working together in a new way, which allows GUVIST to push boundaries and innovate. For the Greater Upper Valley, integration also means eliminating the effect of our geographical boundary on service delivery.
Responsibility:
The integration of leadership, decision-making and operations culminate in a shared accountability for the wellbeing of our community and the system of care. Organizations that participate in GUVIST are responsible for not only their own services recipients, but intentionally bridging services between organizations and community/informal networks, which increases access to services, and the ability to do so with dignity.
