Building a positive ethical culture is a long-term process. It involves much more than just company trappings and perks – leaders must make a commitment to people and to creating a positive work space. When things seem to be going well, it’s easy to miss signs that the culture may be off track.
Less than eight months after becoming CEO of Verity Health System, the successor to the former Daughters of Charity Health System, Mitchell Creem, has been demoted to chief administrative officer. Verity also hired a new COO, B. Joseph Badalian, it disclosed today.
The Redwood City-based system’s board of directors replaced Creem as CEO late last week with Andrei Soran, who was initially hired in April as president and COO.
Verity disclosed the “restructuring of the system’s executive team” on July 28. Board chairman Jack Krouskup said the new CEO “will continue to lead the efforts to revitalize our Verity hospitals to ensure that they continue to serve our communities across California for generations to come.”
Badalian, most recently CEO at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center in Southern California, a for-profit Tenet Healthcare Corp. (NYSE: THC) hospital, is set to start in the new job Sept. 1.
Why revamp the leadership team less than eight months in? “A turnaround is all hands on deck,” Soran told the Business Times late last week. “It’s a major effort, a fairly major turnaround.”
A survey by RHR International found that half of CEOs report experiencing feelings of loneliness in their roles. Of this group, 61% believe isolation hinders their performance. That’s a significant proportion of top executives who are suffering and not performing at their peak. Executive loneliness and isolation is bad for people and bad for business.
In my experience, fear and ego are two of the main causes of this kind of isolation. On the one hand, there’s fear of appearing inadequate and the concern that asking for help could make others doubt your judgment. After all, CEOs are supposed to have all the answers—the buck stops with you. Meanwhile, your ego is telling you that you really don’t need others to help make big decisions; who knows your business better than you do? Combined, these two factors can prevent even highly capable CEOs from turning to others for support when they need it most.
It’s hospital ratings season in America, that time of year when marketing executives kick it into high gear to trumpet — and spin — the way their hospitals are graded by outside organizations.
This year, their workload has been especially heavy. In addition to annual rankings released Tuesday by U.S. News & World Report, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) just released its star-rating system for hospitals nationwide. While the ratings offer some valuable information to consumers, here’s why you shouldn’t put too much stock in the results.
The federal government and private organizations use a vast array of hospital data to break down their performance and boil it into easy-to-understand ratings for consumers. U.S. News & World report formulates its rankings by relying on a mix of physician surveys and data reported to trade groups and the federal government. CMS ratings are based solely on data hospitals are required to report to the agency.
The information itself may be objective, but which data points are used — and how they are weighted — can lead to contradictory conclusions. Consider the following:
Of US News & World Report’s’ top five hospitals, only one — Mayo Clinic — received a top, five-star rating from CMS. The rest — Cleveland Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, UCLA Medical Center, and Johns Hopkins — were not even in CMS’ top 100. (Johns Hopkins did not receive a rating from CMS because of incomplete data).
J.B. Silvers, a professor of health care finance at Case Western Reserve University, said the information, while boiled down into simple lists and stars, can be difficult for consumers to unpack, especially when hospitals are working behind the scenes to figure out ways to better their scores every year. “Some hospitals are better at working the numbers than others,” he said. “My guess is the safety net hospitals aren’t as good at it as richer hospitals.”
A new study suggests that a group of biosimilar drugs, which are used to treat such afflictions as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and inflammatory bowel disease, appear as safe and effective as their more expensive brand-name counterparts, which are known as biologics. A biosimilar drug is a nearly identical variant of a biologic and is expected to provide the same result in patients.
The analysis arrives as the US health care system, which is increasingly overwhelmed by high-priced medicines, looks toward biosimilars to provide savings. In the United States, where regulators have approved just two such drugs, some estimates say prices will be 20 percent to 30 percent less than the cost of biologics.
But until more biosimilars become available, there is some debate over the extent to which physicians will become sufficiently comfortable prescribing these drugs. Biologics are made from living cells and the brand-name biotech industry, for instance, says the complex processes needed to develop biosimilar drugs may produce slight changes that can affect safety and effectiveness. The threat of lower-priced competition has prompted brand-name drug makers to petition the Food and Drug Administration to delay approvals, among other tactics.
The study authors, however, argue their findings should put some of those concerns to rest. After analyzing 19 studies, they maintain the available data indicates biosimilar drugs based on brand-name versions of anti-TNF inhibitors should be considered interchangeable. The anti-TNF inhibitors include such big sellers as Amgen’s Enbrel, AbbVie’s Humira, and Johnson & Johnson’s Remicade.
“This is the $1 billion question — are the biosimilar versions comparable? And we found, in just about every outcome examined, that the biosimilars fare very well,” said Dr. Caleb Alexander, who is codirector of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness, and one of the authors of the study, which appeared today in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
A traumatic brain injury can cause neurons to shrivel up and die, but scientists are hopeful there’s a small window of time where treatment might be able to save some of those cells. Researchers examined neurons in petri dishes to see what exactly happens after a blow to the head. Here’s what lead researcher Christian Franck of Brown University told me about the work, published this morning in Scientific Reports.
What were you studying?
We wanted to understand, from a trauma perspective, how much is too much for these cells to take. When is their breaking point? And once they reach it, how long does it take for them to degenerate and die? The timeline from that initial trauma to cellular shut down is important to understand how much time one has to intervene therapeutically [after a brain injury].
How long did it take?
After six hours, you have biological events that’ve taken place that are irreversible. Cells shut down and cell death can’t be avoided. You know that you’ll have less time than that to do anything about it. There’s nothing you can do but hope the brain helps resolve itself.
Does that differ from one patient to the next?
The model we built is very simple. We only looked at neurons, but the brain has thousands of millions of cells involved. We didn’t look at that interplay. It’s important to note that what we built in the dish is not the brain.
In a key advance for the study of depression, a comprehensive scan of human DNA has turned up the apparent hiding places of more than a dozen genes linked to the disorder.
“This is a jumping-off point” for further work to reveal the biological underpinnings of depression, which in turn can guide development of new drugs, said Ashley Winslow, an author of a paper on the work.
Experts said the result is important not only for its specific findings, but also for its demonstration that the study’s approach can help uncover clues to the biology of depression, which is largely a mystery.
