Cartoon – Why It’s called Leadership
Category Archives: Leadership Alignment
Cartoon – Leadership by Words
Cartoon – Taking Credit for the Quarter
Debating the best way to Chase Commercial Market Share
https://mailchi.mp/e60a8f8b8fee/the-weekly-gist-september-23-2022?e=d1e747d2d8
Cross-subsidy economics are increasingly challenged for America’s hospitals. Aging Baby Boomers are moving from commercial insurance to Medicare, decreasing the share of patients with lucrative private coverage, and insurers are increasingly reticent to provide the rate increases providers need to make up for the worsening mix.
At a recent executive retreat, one health system debated the best strategies to increase their capture of commercial volume. Most of the conversation focused on traditional market-based tactics to increase access and awareness in fast-growing, higher income areas of their service region.
For instance, the system’s chief marketing officer was pushing to increase advertising in the rapidly expanding suburbs, and advocated building ambulatory surgery centers in a wealthy area of town with a boom of new home construction.
The chief strategy officer shared a different perspective, supporting an employer-focused strategy. His logic: “In most businesses, the CEO and the janitor have the same benefit plans. If we only focus on the wealthy parts of town, we’re missing a big portion of the workers with good insurance.” He advocated for a new round of direct-to-employer contracting outreach, hoping to steer workers to high-value primary and specialty care solutions.
In reality, any system looking to move commercial share will need to do both—but even the best playbook for building commercial volume is unlikely to close the growing cross-subsidy gap. To maintain profitability in the long term, health systems must reduce costs for managing Medicare patients by delivering lower-cost care in lower-cost settings, with lower-cost staff.
Cartoon – Avoiding Confrontation
Cartoon – We have a Strategy
What the “org chart” can reveal about physician culture
https://mailchi.mp/ce4d4e40f714/the-weekly-gist-june-10-2022?e=d1e747d2d8
A consultant colleague recently recounted a call from a health system looking for support in physician alignment. He mused, “It’s never a good sign when I hear that the medical group reports to the system CFO [chief financial officer].” We agree. It’s not that CFOs are necessarily bad managers of physician networks, or aren’t collaborative with doctors—as you’d expect from any group of leaders, there are CFOs who excel at these capabilities, and ones that don’t.
The reporting relationship reveals less about the individual executive, and more about how the system views its medical group: less as a strategic partner, and more as “an asset to feed the [hospital] mothership.” Or worse, as a high-cost asset that is underperforming, with the CFO brought in as a “fixer”, taking over management of the physician group to “stop the bleed.”
Ideally the medical group would be led by a senior physician leader, often with the title of chief clinical officer or chief physician executive, who has oversight of all of the system’s physician network relationships, and can coordinate work across all these entities, sitting at the highest level of the executive team, reporting to the CEO. Of course, these kinds of physician leaders—with executive presence, management acumen, respected by physician and executive peers—can be difficult to find.
Having a respected physician leader at the helm is even more important in a time of crisis, whether they lead alone or are paired with the CFO or another executive. Systems should have a plan to build the leadership talent needed to guide doctors through the coming clinical, generational, and strategic shifts in practice.
Cartoon – Leadership Alignment
Taking Away the Vetoes
A brainstorming session with the CEO of a digital health startup this week highlighted a frustration familiar to anyone who’s tried to make innovation happen in the slow-moving world of health systems.
Meeting with a system executive team to discuss a new approach to virtual care delivery, he described the cross-enterprise collaboration required, and said, “You could see everyone looking around the table to see what everyone else thought, before anyone was willing to react.”
No surprise, as complex bureaucracies don’t reward risk-taking by leaders; often, innovation is slowly suffocated by internal politics and turf-protecting behavior.
That’s why we often repeat advice from one of the most progressive, successful system CEOs we’ve worked with: “You’ve got to eliminate the vetoes if you want to get stuff done. I don’t let people leave the room until we’ve managed to set aside all the reflexive objections and arrive at a resolution.
I expect leaders to be solution-driven, not objection-driven.” For all the times we’ve been asked how to build a successful “innovation infrastructure,” it strikes us often the answer lies in leadership, not org charts.
Strategic misalignment at the heart of a governance issue
https://mailchi.mp/016621f2184b/the-weekly-gist-december-3-2021?e=d1e747d2d8
In our work with health systems, physician groups, and other organizations over the years, we’ve often been asked to facilitate board-level discussions about governance—resolving board conflicts, navigating difficult decisions, evaluating board composition.
A recent discussion again highlighted one of our main observations in working with boards: governance problems are often strategy problems in disguise. Working with a system that has grown through acquisition over the years, and whose board includes members from several of the “legacy” hospitals which had merged into the system over time, we were asked to help facilitate a dialogue about investment priorities across the component parts of the system.
At the root of the issue: each of the “representatives” of the subsidiary entities were pushing to have their own investment needs take precedence. On the face of it, that’s a governance problem: boards shouldn’t be constituent assemblies, with each member representing the interests of a sub-unit. Rather, they should act with one purpose: to advance the interests of the whole.
But that misalignment turned out to be a symptom of a larger problem: there was no consensus at the board level about what the strategic direction of the combined system should be, and what role each component part played in that direction.
That’s a strategy problem, masquerading as a governance issue. Identifying the strategic issue allowed the board to reframe the dialogue around vision, which then unblocked the subsequent decisions about investments. Good strategy and good governance go hand in hand.
HENRY KOTULA 