Resource Library

Executive and board support is needed for physician leadership that lasts. Collaborative leadership with physicians will be essential for hospitals to successfully create and maintain agile organizations that can compete in the rapidly changing healthcare landscape.

A three-stage framework can help boards to identify information technology priorities

Four areas of knowledge and skills must be mastered to make the move from fee for service.

Incentive compensation plans are intended to focus executives’ attention on their organizations’ most vital priorities and initiatives. As health care organizations revise their business strategies to address the ongoing transformation of care delivery and payment, health care boards also need to reassess the structure and measures of performance in their executive incentive compensation plans.

Healthcare executive support can influence the value these organizations provide.

What if the typical hospital board meeting — multiple hours spent on endless pages of financial data, slide after slide of bullet points and little time left for meaningful discussion — could be more engaging and less time-consuming? With some planning and practice, boards and senior executives can make this happen.

This monograph offers guidance on proactively considering best practices in executive pay, including the changing role of incentive compensation, good governance practices to mitigate risk and choosing appropriate peer comparison data to support the compensation decision-making process.

Succession planning is a high-stakes governance responsibility. The significant costs of protracted CEO searches and failed replacements are well-documented. Yet, data from the for-profit and nonprofit sectors continue to show that many boards aren’t focusing enough attention on succession planning or on getting it right.

In July 2011, five national health associations jointly urged hospital and health system leaders to take three steps to help eliminate health disparities and improve quality of care. These steps called for increasing...

Sound policy management can support the board’s risk and compliance oversight responsibilities

This publication discusses observations and trends about system development and identifies models of governance that are emerging as new organizations form and determine what it really means to become a system. It also reviews issues and obstacles that can arise as models of governance change and suggests steps boards can take to address them on the path toward more effective system governance.

Executives, trustees and physicians should be the leading advocates of philanthropy.

The emerging health care environment has changed the game for health care organizations and for physician leadership. The turbulence of that environment is going to require what could be called “agile organizations” adept at matching leadership and decision-making styles and setting and executing strategies appropriate to the nature and depth of environmental change.

Recruiting board members is a challenge for every hospital and health system, but the task is particularly difficult in small communities. At Benefits Health System, Great Falls, Mont., our pool of candidates is largely limited to the city’s 60,000 residents, despite the fact that we are the tertiary referral center for a population of 250,000 across nearly 40,000 square miles of rural Montana.

When someone walks into your hospital, his first impression is created by the physical architecture. But his lasting impression — and what he is most likely to talk about when he returns home — will be determined by what we call the “invisible architecture” of core values, organizational culture and behavioral expectations.

The traditional acute-care hospital is becoming just one of the entities within a larger system that probably includes primary and specialty care clinics, ambulatory care sites, behavioral health care and post-acute care. In addition, the systems may be employing physicians, developing robust philanthropic organizations, developing entrepreneurial businesses, conducting research and offering medical education.

The complexity around physician compensation demands defined, layered board oversight

The U.S. health care system is quickly moving toward a care delivery model that encompasses entire populations, not just the patients who present themselves for care. This is because many at-risk individuals in the community seldom, if ever, seek treatment or health screenings—and they have a disproportionate impact on total health care spending.

For boards to participate in shaping their new organization, they must be currently performing at an extremely high level. The following is a list of four practices that hospital and health system boards must be engaged in today, in order to be successful in the future.

This Mind Map, developed in association with innovation partner HDR, depicts a variety of business objectives in healthcare today that are top of mind for healthcare strategists.