I thank my strategic partner, Susan Douglass, who is an expert in using compensation to facilitate alignment of goals and behaviors and wrote the white paper, “Becoming The Physician’s Organization of Choice” Susan invited me to accompany her on an assessment of a US hospital to help them define the meaning of alignment to practicing physicians.

  The reason that I have chosen to write a tribute to my mentor, Tom Atchison is that he has helped me in so many ways to serve the needs of hospitals and healthcare systems to improve care for their communities.

Tom has an innate ability to simplify complex processes.  

I felt honored to give three presentations at the annual meeting of the Assisted Living Federation of America (ALFA) last week.  My titles included The Playbook for Partnering with Hospitals in an Era of Outcomes-Based Payment Reform, Past, Present, and Future Challenges of Healthcare Reform, and 21st Century Healthcare Economics.  

Introduction

As described in Part I, the theme of the 2013 ACHE Congress was “Changing Healthcare Design.”  My reason for writing What I Learned from ACHE Congress, Part II is to share insights with those who did not attend this year’s session.

Introduction

The reason for writing “What I Learned at ACHE Congress,” is to share insights with those who did not attend this year’s session.  I feel especially for the healthcare executives in the military and VA medical centers, for whom the sequester made it impossible to obtain funding for travel and registration.

Last week, I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Prof. Len Friedman at the Congress of the American College of Healthcare Executives.  Virtuous Healthcare Organizations: Breaking Away from Blamestorming summarized a case of a CEO who lost the support of his medical staff and Board after a series of actions that led to a suit after he replaced the head of Radiology, refused to seat the elected President of the Medical Staff, and confiscated the Medical Staff dues fund.  

The inspiration for this post on collaborative cardinals came from How to Pick the Next Pope by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz based on the following insight:

 The pope’s job is vastly different than the ones done by cardinals, just as the CEO role is nothing like those of C-Level executives….

This post about collaborative CEOs takes inspiration from Molly Gamble’s recent interview with Quint Studer, entitled 5 Things the Most Extraordinary Hospital CEOs Do. I encourage you to read this article in its entirety to capture the nuances.  Briefly, extraordinary CEOs:

• Diagnose their organization’s ailments objectively: they constantly push employees to improve or maintain top performance
• Drive variability out of leadership: using the example of the way that meetings run, he mentioned that variation by a single executive can hold back the entire organization
• Align their outlook with their organization’s outlook: according to Mr.

The inspiration for today’s post comes from Dr. John Mandrola, who wrote in What good coaching has to do with medicine that in both, the fundamental tenet remains:

Above all else, do no harm

In Collaborative Co-Mentoring, a general surgeon who was promoted to section chief, noted the importance of collaborative coaching:

We’re not stupid- we just need to be trained

The practice of medicine, as my yoga teacher reminds me, is like the practice of yoga, in that mastery occurs over time, not the first time we see a pose. 

I talked with a management team recently about the marital counseling that they asked me to do last year to keep their surgeons from fragmenting as the hospital negotiated insurance contracts.  In retrospect, problems began years before, when the hospital employed group members under a contract that measured and rewarded only individual productivity, to which I obtained the following response:

I don’t understand citizenship.