Founded in 2005 at the Institute of Information Systems at the University of St. Gallen (IWI-HSG), the Competence Center Health Network Engineering (CC HNE) represented an association of researchers and practitioners whose goal was to support the transformation of the Swiss healthcare system with models and methods from the St. Gallen business engineering approach. This paper provides a retrospective of the work of the CC HNE. Starting with a motivation for the research focus as well as a classification in the research of the IWI-HSG, the main research results of the Competence Center are presented. This includes in particular work on networkability, performance management and maturity models as well as a Networkability Maturity Model. Subsequently, it will be discussed how the research results have found their way into practice (keyword: relevance). Here, the focus is on established communities of practice, whereby the application of the results in the context of the IT community of practice is examined in more detail. Finally, the results are subjected to a critical appraisal and an outlook on the need for further research is given.