MHA's Executive Briefing

Biggest Challenges Healthcare Executives Have Faced: 4 CEOs Weigh In

Hospital and health system CEOs face a variety of challenges throughout their careers, but some challenges loom larger or taught more valuable lessons than others. Here, four hospital and health system CEOs share some of the biggest challenges they have faced during their time as a healthcare leader.

ACHE Chairman: New Opportunities for New Leaders

These are challenging times for health care leaders, but in this exclusive video interview, Diana Smalley, 2013-2014 ACHE chairman, says that executives have a tremendous opportunity to transform their organizations.

10 Ideas That Hospital and Health System CEOs Need to Ditch

Today's hospital and health system leaders can learn a lot from George Bernard Shaw, the famed Irish writer and social critic. He is renowned for the following passage: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." 

Now, more than ever, hospitals and health system CEOs cannot sit on their hands as new care delivery models, payment systems and other changes flood the healthcare system. For CEOs and other leaders who may believe the new health care reforms and social norms will not apply to their institutions, there is no more time to be "unreasonable," as Mr. Shaw put it. 

Several of the nation's most progressive CEOs have signed onto this thought process — David Feinberg, MD, Chris Van Gorder, Dean Gruner, MD, Bill Carpenter and many others outlined below. More specifically, here are 10 ideas that CEOs need to cast aside and what the alternative leadership strategy should be, and how those hospital and health system CEOs embody "new school" ways of being "reasonable" and progressive.

Skills Needed to Lead the Hospital of the Future

Organizational culture begins with healthy leadership. It is expressed through vision, modeled by leaders, and defined by clear behaviors and rewards for healing interactions that extend from the bedside to the boardroom. Engaging the community and bringing its members into the conversation is key.

Read more from Hospitals & Health Networks here.

AHA fellowship helps senior leaders transform health care

Senior health care leaders can apply through January to participate in the next American Hospital Association Health Care Transformation Fellowship, a six-month program that helps participants implement new care delivery and payment models, manage risk, develop physician leaders and manage population health. The program includes learning retreats, webinars, a fellowship project and advisory sessions.

For more information and an application, visit www.AHACareTransformationFellowship.org.

A Little Paranoia and a Whole Lot of Hope

Six hospital CEOs describe the changing role of leadership today and the need to educate, communicate with and inspire staff in the face of so much uncertainty. Read more from Hospitals & Health Networks magazine here.

How strategists lead

The role of the strategist [is] as a meaning maker for companies, as a voice of reason, and as an operator. The richness of these roles, and their deep interconnections, underscore the fact that strategy is much more than a detached analytical exercise. Analysis has merit, to be sure, but it will never make strategy the vibrant core that animates everything a company is and does.

Read the full article from McKinsey Quarterly (free registration required).

HHS accepting applicants for Innovation Fellows Program

The Department of Health and Human Services will accept applications through July 20 from external experts and entrepreneurs to serve in its Innovation Fellows Program. HHS plans to pair up to 10 external fellows with department fellows to work 6-12 months on specific projects beginning this fall.

Project topics include accelerating clinical quality measures for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; designing an electronic infrastructure to implement Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program eligibility requirements under the ACA; building technology that allows people to continue using their durable medical equipment during prolonged power outages in natural disasters; and devising electronic tracking and transport of the nation’s organ transplant system. For more information, visit www.hhs.gov/open/initiatives/innovationfellows.

CEO Checklist for High-Value Health Care

A new report from the participants -- mostly CEOs of hospital systems --of the Institute of Medicine Roundtable on Value & Science-Driven Health Care is out, sharing lessons compiled on how to achieve better health care outcomes at lower costs. The report is intended to generate discussion about how to collectively transform the health system at the individual organization level.

Read more here.

The Data's In: Honesty Really Does Start at the Top

It's hard to reach the 90th percentile in anything, of course, and honesty is no different. So when we ran across one of those exceptional individuals, we wanted to have a word with him.

A global controller of a professional services firm of more than 40,000 employees, he'd just participated in a 360-feedback process where he'd been assessed by his manager, peers, and direct reports on 16 leadership competencies. And he'd hit that elusive 90th percentile mark on his ratings for honesty and integrity. Explaining just what a difficult feat it is to receive feedback marks that remarkably high, we asked him: "What is your secret?" After all, it's not like in his role he hadn't confronted his share of temptation or hard trade-offs.

Read more from the Harvard Business Review here.