iProtean—Mission & Strategy As strategists, the vital skills for the board are: ask, listen, assess. (Punit Renjen, Board Chair, Deliotte LLP, “Exceptional Boards,” Leadership Excellence, March 2012) Boards play vital roles for the organization and must work as a team with management to direct the organization to long-term success. It begins with board […]
Hospital executives are in high gear preparing their organizations for the implementation of the structural components of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—accountable care organizations, bundled payments, medical homes and more. For example, some hospitals are preparing applications for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation’s Bundled Payment for Care Improvement, and those applications are due […]
In mid-2011 Deloitte Center for Health Solutions surveyed a nationally representative random sample of U.S. primary care and specialist physicians to record their attitudes toward health reform and how it may affect the future practice of medicine. Among the findings were that physicians are split as to whether health reform is a good start or […]
Hospitals have done relatively well in managing board-level conflicts of interest in the last several years, both as a matter of internal necessity and because of increasing demands from the IRS. In today’s environment, however, new questions concerning “constituent” interests have surfaced. “Constituent” interests refer to situations when individuals elected to a joint venture […]
The medical staff, though it has evolved over the last several years, faces additional pressures to accommodate the changing healthcare delivery environment. The American Health Lawyers Association recently sponsored an in-depth discussion of the hospital medical staff and how and why it is evolving; contemporary challenges to the traditional role including declining physician participation, […]
You may have heard this: “culture eats strategy for lunch.” It’s a popular phrase in business, and popular on Internet business and video sites as well. But culture remains difficult to define, especially when applied to groups or teams within an organization. We can say, loosely, that culture is “the way we do things around […]
Much of today’s activity in hospitals and health systems continues to focus on consolidation. Hospitals have been here before, but today’s pressures have added to the list of strategic reasons to consider partnerships with other hospitals or health systems. “Many of the forces behind today’s consolidation are similar to those in the past. However, […]
Whatever the market and financial conditions of your hospital, the quickly evolving healthcare environment dictates a robust assessment of its future direction, including strategic collaborations. AHLA and HFMA recently noted in a jointly sponsored webinar on mergers & acquisitions that “Healthcare reform and other macro economic factors are pushing more providers to integrate both vertically […]
I’ve been working in healthcare finance for about 26 years and I can’t think of another time when we had this level of risk within the industry. (Eric Jordahl, Kaufman, Hall & Associates) A phrase commonly heard in many industries—risk management—migrated to the healthcare industry several years ago. But the financial crisis has moved […]
Hospital and health system board members are frequently required to interpret the financial “language” of healthcare—in both the financial statements and ratios of their organization and essential industry reports—in order to make informed decisions. As important as it is to understand the financial picture, the terminology can be daunting. An excerpt from a recent Special […]