Challenges for Healthcare Leadership Boards

For decades healthcare has been a difficult and highly regulated enterprise. And, until 2013 it was possible for senior leaders and the boards that supervise them to count on an industry with relative stability and predictability.

But that changed with the beginning of a massive shift of reimbursement and changes to patient safety and quality standards, which are reshaping how healthcare organizations operate to remain competitive. These changes have created new challenges for healthcare boards.

Opinion leaders we spoke with during the course of this research identified three kinds of healthcare board behavior that they believed to Recommended Site be especially important:

A strong board should insist that the right information is provided. It must stress the importance of quality and safety goals and give trustees concrete goals. This means utilizing National Quality Forum-endorsed measures and creating a robust benchmarking plan that can identify the top performers and can understand the processes they employ. The aim is to empower trustees to challenge each hospital and system to improve their quality and reduce medical errors.

The board should also solicit trustees who are experts in the field of safety and quality (e.g. high reliability, Six Sigma) to be a part of and chair the board’s quality committee. The ideal is for these individuals to be drawn from other industries like aviation or nuclear power. This will ensure that the board has a specialist on hand to assist and guide the CEO and other employees in setting and achieving the right goals and that the healthcare leadership is doing all it can to improve the performance.