Category Archives: Leadership Physician Alignment

Physicians lack trust in hospital leadership

Posted on by • Posted in Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Leadership, Leadership Medical Staff, Leadership Physician, Leadership Physician Alignment, Leadership Transparency, Leadership Trust, Physician Employment, Physician Leadership, Transparency, Trust • Leave a comment

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A recent physician survey conducted by strategic healthcare communications firm Jarrard Inc. uncovered a startling finding: only 36 percent of physicians employed by or affiliated with not-for-profit health systems trust that their system’s leaders are honest and transparent. In contrast, a slight majority of physicians working with investor-owned health systems and practices answered that question in the opposite.

Overall, only around half of physicians trust their organization’s leaders when it comes to financial, operational, and patient care decision-making. Unsurprisingly, doctors put the most trust in peer physicians, by a wide margin.

The Gist: While the numbers, especially for nonprofit systems, are stark, this survey reflects an on-the-ground reality felt at health systems in recent years. Physician fatigue has spiked in the wake of the pandemic.

And health system-physician relationships are also being disrupted by cost pressures, payer and investor acquisitions, and the shift of care to ambulatory settings. We’ve heard from physicians that, compared to hospital owners, investor-backed systems provide greater transparency and clearer financial goals centered around the success of the business. 

That physicians trust their peers so highly suggests a path forward: provide physician leaders with greater transparency into system performance and agency over strategy, with clear goals and metrics.

Has the backlash against physician employment begun?

Posted on by • Posted in Board, CEO, Governance, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Leadership, Leadership Physician, Leadership Physician Alignment, Physician Employment, Private Equity, Strategy • Leave a comment

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Given the economic situation most hospitals face today, it was only a matter of time before we started to hear comments like we heard recently from a system CEO. 

“We’ve got to pump the brakes on physician employment this year,” she said. “This arms race with Optum and PE firms has gotten out of control, and we’re looking at almost $300K per year of loss per employed doc.”

 Of course, that system (like most) has been calling that loss a “subsidy” or an “investment” for the past several years, justified by the ability to pursue an integrated model of care and to grow the overall system book of business.

But with non-hospital competitors unfettered by the requirement to pay “fair market value” for physicians, the bidding war for doctors has become unsustainable for many hospitals. Around half of physicians are now employed by hospitals, with many more employed in other corporate settings.

There’s a growing sense that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of employment, and now the phrase “stopping the bleed”—commonplace in the post-PhyCor days of the early 2000s—has begun to ring out again.
 
One challenge: finding ways to talk openly about “pumping the brakes” with the board, given that most systems have key physician stakeholders as part of their governance structure. Twice in the last month we’ve had CEOs ask us about reconfiguring their boards so that there are fewer doctors involved in governance—a sharp about-face from the “integration” narrative of just a few years ago.

It’s a tricky balance to strike. We recently heard a fascinating statistic that we’re working to verify: a third of all hospital CEO turnover in the last year was driven by votes of no-confidence by the medical staff. True or not, there’s no doubt that running afoul of physicians can be a career-limiting move for hospital executives, so if we’re about to enter an era of dialing back physician employment strategies, it’ll be fascinating to see how the conversations unfold. We’ll continue to keep an eye on this shift in direction and would love to know what you’re hearing as well, and to discuss how we might be of assistance in navigating what are sure to be a series of difficult choices.

Designing physician leadership for scale 

Posted on by • Posted in Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Leadership Medical Staff, Leadership Physician, Leadership Physician Alignment • Leave a comment

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This week we met with a health system chief clinical officer who sought guidance on physician leadership structures: “We have more ‘closely aligned’ doctors than ever, but I feel like we’re really short on physician leaders to organize our medical staff around important goals and move them forward.” It’s a common concern.

One medical group president lamented the loss of connection between doctors as their group grew rapidly: “Our medical group has almost doubled in size in the past five years. When we had 300 providers, I knew every one, and they all felt like they could come to me directly. We just passed 1,000, and there’s no way I can know a thousand people, let alone have a personal relationship with them.”

As networks have grown, executives have shared their need to develop a new “middle layer of physician leaders”, who can build personal connections with frontline doctors. But for this middle layer to work, they stress, these leaders must be tightly connected with the executives who run the group and the health system and carry real decision-making authority: “Real respect is critical, and it won’t happen if they feel like a mouthpiece.” 
 
There was also debate about the right candidate for the job, in particular, the need to have younger physicians, who can relate directly to the needs of their peers, in leadership roles: “It took us a while to realize that the profile of our traditional medical staff leader, an older doctor nearing retirement, wasn’t working when we’re looking to lead a ‘majority millennial’ medical group.”

Regardless, every medical group agreed that they needed to identify and train more leaders, and create roles to bring them into leadership earlier in their careers. But many questions remain about how to design leadership roles. How many frontline providers can a leader work with? How should leadership structures span employed and aligned independent doctors? And how should leaders weigh same-specialty alignment versus cross-specialty collaboration? If you are thinking through these issues, we’d love to hear from you about what is working, and what challenges have emerged. 

What the “org chart” can reveal about physician culture 

Posted on by • Posted in Chief Clinical Officer, Chief Physician Executive, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Leadership, Leadership Alignment, Leadership Culture, Leadership Physician Alignment, Leadership Skill Sets, Organization Chart, Physician Alignment, Physician Leadership, Reporting Relationship, Strategic Leadership, Talent Imperative, Talent Management • Leave a comment

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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. 

Can we take the long view on physician strategy? 

Posted on by • Posted in Consumer Focus, Consumer-Centric, Leadership, Leadership Flexibility, Leadership Implementation, Leadership Physician Alignment, Leadership Vision, Leadership Will, Pandemic, Physician Leadership, Physician Strategy, Strategic Alignment, Strategy, Transformation • Leave a comment

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Editor's note: Taking the long view | Campaign US

It feels like a precarious moment in health systems’ relationships with their doctors. The pandemic has accelerated market forces already at play: mounting burnout, the retirement of Baby Boomer doctors, pressure to grow virtual care, and competition from well-funded insurers, investors and disruptors looking to build their own clinical workforces.

Many health systems have focused system strategy around deepening consumer relationships and loyalty, and quite often we’re told that physicians are roadblocks to consumer-centric offerings (problematic since doctors hold the deepest relationships with a health system’s patients).

When debriefing with a CEO after a health system board meeting, we pointed out the contrast between the strategic level of discussion of most of the meeting with the more granular dialogue around physicians, which focused on the response to a private equity overture to a local, nine-doctor orthopedics practice. It struck us that if this level of scrutiny was applied to other areas, the board would be weighing in on menu changes in food services or selecting throughput metrics for hospital operating rooms. 
 
The CEO acknowledged that while he and a small group of physician leaders have tried to focus on a long-term physician network strategy, “it has been impossible to move beyond putting out the ‘fire of the week’—when it comes to doctors, things that should be small decisions rise to crisis level, and that makes it impossible to play the long game.”

It’s obvious why this happens: decisions involving a small number of doctors can have big implications for short-term, fee-for-service profits, and for the personal incomes of the physicians involved. But if health systems are to achieve ambitious goals, they must find a way to play the long game with their doctors, enfranchising them as partners in creating strategy, and making (and following through on) tough decisions. If physician and system leaders don’t have the fortitude to do this, they’ll continue to find that doctors are a roadblock to transformation.

Will choosing a “white coat CEO” advance physician alignment?

Posted on by • Posted in Board, Board Chairman, CEO Clinical, CEO White Coat, Leadership, Leadership Alignment, Leadership Culture, Leadership Integrity, Leadership Intent, Leadership Listens, Leadership Physician Alignment, Leadership Transition, Leadership Trust • Leave a comment

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Physician Advocates Docs Ditch The White Coat - Too Germy | WUKY

We recently got a call from a health system board chair seeking our perspective on the system’s ongoing search for a new CEO. At the top of his list: trying to understand how important it will be for the next CEO to be a physician. “We’ve never had a doctor in the role,” he mused. “But now we employ hundreds of doctors. And you’d have to imagine that having a physician as CEO would help with physician alignment.” 

While choosing a physician CEO brings great signal value to the medical staff, we cautioned that it’s far from a panacea. 

Of course, there are advantages in having walked in a frontline clinician’s shoes, being able to personally identify with their challenges and speak their language. But over the years, working with hundreds of health system CEOs, we’ve found that the most important characteristic of a CEO who will advance physician strategy is the desire to form strong personal relationships with doctors and draw on their counsel.

Does the CEO build a “kitchen cabinet” of physician leaders whom he can consult? Are physicians viewed as something to be managed, a problem to solve, or seen as true partners in strategy? Even more simply, does she like spending time with physicians, or groan every time a meeting with doctors pops up on the calendar? We’ve seen many non-physician CEOs excel at building strong, strategic ties with doctors, and some physician executives, who become jaded by never-ending physician alignment struggles, fail to advance partnerships with their colleagues.

One retiring physician CEO, reflecting on his replacement by a nonclinical executive, summed it up well: “I have a feeling he’ll do well with our doctors. He counts several physicians among his closest friends, which is a great sign.”