AHA Leadership Summit: Referral Relationships

We've got more from Kirk Mathews on the AHA Leadership Summit last weekend. Kirk was impressed by a session about managing the referral process--ie, ensuring a patient ends up at your hospital--led by Marc D. Halley, MBA. Key points from Mr. Halley, via Kirk:

• "Physician integration" these days = hospitals employing physicians...a strategy that became popular in the early '90s. Unfortunately, many hospitals are making the same mistakes as in the '90s, including:

--overpaying for physicians
--removing ancillary services from the physicians' offices and putting them all in the hospital
--adding to employment costs by providing benefits the doctors didn't provide to themselves
--adding occupancy costs by taking doctors from a $14 space and moving them to a $20 space
--disengaging doctors from the governance and business performance of the practice
--inadequately managing talent
--misunderstanding the "retail" side of the business

• The CEO should function as a market manager who understands medical practices (the needs, desires and priorities), has a market plan and has great customer contact. He or she needs to know where, precisely, the market is; who holds the market (is it PCPs?); and what the market holders are doing with it.
• Cultivating relationships is key, because referrals follow relationships. Relationships will atrophy over time, unless they are actively maintained.
  

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posted by Jessica Berthold at 12:42 PM   0 Comments

AHA Leadership Summit: How CEOs can avoid getting fired

Kirk Mathews, CEO of Inpatient Management, Inc. of St. Louis, Mo., attended the AHA Leadership Summit this past weekend, and graciously agreed to share what he learned at various sessions. Here's a paraphrase from Kirk about a session entitled "'How to Avoid the 'Pink Slip'," which covered different hospital CEO leadership styles, and how CEOs can avoid getting fired:

The session started by listing the four main reasons a CEO gets fired: failure to understand or respond to physicians' needs, failure to recognize one's own shortcomings, failure to recognize early warning signs of organizational unrest, and failure to anticipate and manage board issues.

Warnings signs of medical staff unrest might include physicians meeting off-site, a lowering of surgeon satisfaction, a lack of dialogue with medical staff, an increase in doctor-owned competing entities, and a decrease in market share. On a related note, CEOs who harbor a distrust of physicians--and who give off that impression--can expect the election of medical staff who are anti-administration.

Physician CEOs aren't necessarily better at medical staff relations than non-physician CEOs. Physician CEOs must know enough to surround themselves with good business people, and be prepared for the possibility that some of their physician colleagues will view them as traitors when they become CEOs. It's also important for CEOs to personally do outreach with those "medical staff" who aren't physically in the hospital but are still integral to its success: the primary care doctors who make referrals.

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posted by Jessica Berthold at 11:24 AM   0 Comments