Consulting and Co-mentoring

Consulting

Dr. Cohn’s passion has been helping physicians, hospital executives, nurses, and board members to work more interdependently. The joy of seeing skeptical physicians act like owners to improve care for their communities has been exciting and fulfilling.

For example, at Santa Barbara Cottage Health System, following a clinical priority setting project that Dr. Cohn facilitated, an orthopedic surgeon persuaded his colleagues to consolidate implant vendors from eight to two, saving the hospital $4.2 million over the next three years. CEO Ron Werft remarked, “Dr. Cohn was instrumental in a successful medical staff planning process at Cottage Hospital in 2003. He gained the trust of the physicians very early on and helped them establish important clinical priorities for our hospital.

Dr. Cohn helps create a safe environment for learning and reflection despite a rapidly changing marketplace that makes conflict inevitable. For example, he facilitated a project that allowed a hospital system to partner with its physicians in a way that made a long-term building project successful, as described by CEO Tom Gagen, below:

We were in a situation where we needed to consolidate two campuses for both economic and quality improvement. Ken showed us a way to start an interface of physicians and hospital executives, alerting physicians to the complexity of running a hospital and helping hospital executives feel more comfortable engaging practicing physicians. In addition, even though I have been in Hospital Administration for many years, I now have a better understanding of the complexities physicians face and how to communicate with them with their concerns more in mind.

For the first time in our history, we now have a roadmap written by a consensus of our top clinicians; we also have identified several previously unidentified physician leaders who can help us go forward. Ken facilitated both processes.

Ken accomplished what he did in an atmosphere of integrity and sensitivity, increasing trust and transparency from the physician and hospital administrator perspectives.

Dr. Cohn helps hospital executives to become more comfortable with clinical issues and to ask patient-related questions without fear of embarrassment:

CEOs with strategy issues related to physicians, physician engagement, conflict resolution, and physician leadership development
COOs with operational issues that affect physicians’ use of time, ways to reduce the cost of expensive supplies used by physicians (such as prostheses), and financial collaboration strategies, including medical staff employment models
Physician executives (VPMAs, CMOs) to understand the interface of business and medicine and to develop effective communication and conflict resolution strategies with practicing physicians and other C-suite executives
Nurse executives to understand and depersonalize physician attitudes and to vent confidentially about male-female behavior differences that affect the workplace environment
CFOs and CIOs to become more comfortable with clinical issues as seen by practicing physicians, such as ways to engage physicians to adopt and use electronic health records.

Co-Mentoring

Dr. Cohn capitalizes on the fact that physicians enjoy learning from fellow practicing physicians, as he helps physicians learn techniques of active listening, win-win negotiation, and conflict resolution that physicians generally were not taught in medical school, residency, or fellowship. As Dr. Michael Ivy noted:

Ken earned the respect of both groups for his understanding of business processes and his outstanding ability to communicate. In part, his success is due to his years as a clinician, which gives him a knowledgeable, genuine physician perspective.

The service he provided went far beyond the scope of the project. For example, he mentored a section chief and obtained for him profit and loss figures that the section chief had never seen before. He was instrumental in helping that section chief craft a bold, far reaching presentation. He consistently reached out to the other presenters and provided them with invaluable assistance.

Ken’s understanding of the problems facing hospitals and physicians in these challenging times is outstanding. He continually offers succinct, timely advice and brilliant insight, which allowed me to chair a Medical Advisory Panel in an effective and efficient manner. I recommend hiring him because he has done an outstanding job for us on this crucial project.

Dr. Cohn uses the term “co-mentoring” because it emphasizes that each party brings knowledge, strength, and wisdom to the process, as this Chief of Staff noted:

I am currently chief of staff at a 350-bed hospital that has been bleeding red ink for two years. In ten months, we lost 20% of our hospital governing board, fired our CEO and CMO and hired a new CEO. I realized in my first year that I needed an experienced guide to help me with basic survival and to use my experiences for personal and professional growth.

Ken has been a tremendously valuable resource. He has made himself available when crises loom. His calm objectivity and talent for reframing issues have helped me find my way forward, and, at times, I am amazed at how much better equipped I feel to deal with my daily duties as a medical staff officer.
Debra Morley, M.D.

Physicians enjoy learning from fellow practicing physicians:

Over the course of 2 years I have evolved from a rock-tossing member of the medical staff to the VPMA at my hospital, where I work with administration and my fellow physicians, striving to promote co-mentoring relationships.

Co-mentoring implies that the partners in the relationship are on equal footing, which greatly improves communication, particularly among physicians who are sensitive to hierarchy.

Ken Cohn facilitated a dialog between the medical staff and administration in 2005, which was transformational, both for the institution and for me personally.

I recognized that the hospital and medical staff shared an important objective: providing the highest quality patient care, and that we could best fulfill that goal by finding ways to work together. We have identified a new generation of physician leaders that has begun to change the practice environment and our workplace culture.

Ken brought us along with a formidable toolkit that allowed us to define and begin working through critical issues from a starting point where basic civility was not necessarily the norm.
Robert J. Schott, MD, MPH, FACC

If you:

Face clinical or resource issues that require partnering with your practicing physicians
Need to work smarter rather than harder
Want to create a lasting legacy based on sustainable collaboration

Please contact Dr. Cohn today at ken.cohn@healthcarecollaboration.com.