For decades, healthcare has been a tangled and highly regulated enterprise. Until 2013, senior leaders and the boards that oversee them could rely on a sector that was relatively stable and predictable.
However, that has changed with the advent of an unprecedented shift in reimbursement, as well as changes to standards for quality and safety for patients that are changing the way healthcare organizations operate to stay competitive. These shifts have brought a new set of challenges for healthcare leadership boards.
Opinion leaders we spoke with during the process of this research cited three types of healthcare board behavior that they believed to be especially important:
A solid board must insist on having the right information. It should emphasize the importance of quality and safety objectives and give trustees realistic goals. This means using measures endorsed by the National Quality Forum and developing a robust strategy for benchmarking which identifies and explains the best performers. The aim is to empower trustees so that they can challenge every hospital to improve their quality and eliminate any errors.
The board should also recruit trustees with a background in quality and safety science (e.g. high reliability, Six Sigma), to serve as chair and members of the board’s Quality Committee. Ideally, these individuals could be drawn from other industries such as nuclear power www.safedata.blog/healthcare-leadership-unveiled-exploring-the-roles-of-hospital-boards-of-directors or aviation. This will ensure that the board has a specialist to assist and guide the CEO and other employees in establishing and achieving the right goals and that the healthcare leadership is doing everything it can to improve performance.
