Resource Library

Boards need to assess troubled areas in their organizations, set goals for improving the culture, and hold leaders accountable for change.

While your organization may strive to improve safety, patient experience, workforce engagement and clinical quality as discrete performance domains, your leadership — and your resources — may be convened around multiple strategies and action plans. Without a single strategy that aligns improvement efforts and acts on the interdependencies of vertical domains, siloed planning can undermine workforce coordination and sustainable change.

Boards can foster patient-centered care by encouraging meaningful conversations during patient encounters and by incentivizing clinicians.

The template is designed to help a hospital or health system develop profiles of disruptive competitors that are already in its service area (or are anticipated to enter its service area). An interactive MS Word document of this template with fields is available.

Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare continues to transform itself to best adapt to the demands of the changing health care environment. As part of the current transformation, the health system has organized its leadership to optimize the interdependencies of safety, quality, patient experience and workforce engagement. Under this construct, the system streamlines decision making, minimizes waste and redundancy, and positions the organization to deliver exceptional patient-centered care.

Hospitals and systems must understand the threats posed by market disruptors and craft specific strategies to protect their missions.

This webinar from governance expert Jamie Orlikoff, explores the hospital board’s crucial responsibility for medical staff credentialing – one of the most difficult governance functions to perform effectively, and one of the most important board responsibilities for patient quality and safety. Become comfortable with the basics of credentialing and how to effectively oversee it to both protect patients and to assure fair, thorough and consistent treatment of physicians. Trustees will acquire a better understanding of the different but related processes involved in appointment and reappointment or physicians to the medical staff, and the delineation of clinical privileges.

Corporate boards, across industry sectors, are increasingly being called upon to support management as the company responds to how innovative competitors “disrupt” their existing business model. Blockbuster, Borders and ESPN are prime examples of established companies that have been pulled into the financial undertow created by nimble disruptors.

A diagnostic tool and organization assessment can help boards address barriers to effective quality oversight.

Health care providers must draw lessons from the core capabilities of successful companies in the internet economy.

Health care is ripe for change. The evidence is all around us. A majority of health care leaders recently surveyed said hospitals and health systems are most in need of disruptive innovation (New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst, February 16, 2017). Consumers are taking charge of their own health and seeking providers that deliver high-quality, affordable and accessible care in ways they have come to expect from their favorite retailers. And disrupters from within and outside of health care are joining forces and competing with traditional health care organizations to give consumers what they are looking for.

Affordability is one of the most important challenges influencing Americans’ ability to access health care. However, no single, agreed-upon definition of health care affordability exists because it is influenced by many complex factors.

Standard Work for Governance Example Source: St. Charles Health System. Used with Permission. Lean principles and practices drive performance improvement by clarifying the steps involved in work processes to avoid wasting time reinventing how work should be done. The board of St. Charles Health System in Bend, Ore., developed “standard work” for several board processes to improve governance performance. An example of standard work for biannual distribution of director stipends appears here.

Topics: Using Competencies in Trustee Selection, Competency-Based Trustee Selection in Action, Using Competencies to Transform Governance

This webinar provides specific examples of and practical tools used by the highest-performing boards as they move toward five categories of advanced governance practices: Visionary, Strategic and ‘System’-focused; Nimble, Streamlined and Clear; Intentional, Disciplined and Consistent; Competency-based, Educated and Evaluated; and Objective, Transparent and Accountable.

Value creation occurs at many levels in organizations. This chart, used by St. Charles Health System based in Bend, Ore., describes the unique role of governance as well the roles of leadership, management and front-line workers in applying Lean principles to support sustained organizational improvement.

By Stephen Mansfield While a clear, bright line between the roles of governance and management does not exist for every issue that boards and organizational leaders must address, defining the relative roles of boards, leaders and managers can enhance governance effectiveness and working relationships.

This webinar examines the best practices of CEO succession planning in a health care setting. Bill Westwood, Senior Client Partner, Korn Ferry presents a thorough description of the process to follow to ensure that succession planning is smooth, efficient and objective. He offers specific recommendations for the roles that each party plays in the process, and what risks should be avoided. Board members, incumbent CEO's and potential CEO's will learn how to prepare for and execute succession planning in their organizations.

This webinar makes the case that the time has come to develop a new model of hospital and health system governance. Presenter Jamie Orlikoff discusses four phases in the evolution of the current model of governance and ongoing market and organizational pressures that make it difficult for the current model to withstand, and he suggests that these pressures are likely to deepen as their pace, scope and scale accelerate.

One of the most difficult aspects of effective governance is understanding the distinction between the roles of management and the board, and how that demarcation varies among different organizations. After three decades of working for boards and serving on many myself, I have learned that clarifying these roles is imperative to well-functioning organizations and their boards.