Resource Library

Patient satisfaction scores are important metrics; they draw attention to the subjective experience of patients who received care from a hospital.

Reprinted with permission from Virginia Mason Medical Center.

Increasing diversity in health care leadership and eliminating care disparities are critical to ensuring high-quality care for all. The renamed Institute for Diversity and Health Equity has created a new model for the American Hospital Association’s (AHA) continued work on these issues and is engaging broader participation.

Board and Committee Composition and Succession Planning...

A critical need exists to elevate the discussion about workforce planning and development to ensure it becomes a standing, rather than crisis-driven, component of comprehensive strategic planning for hospitals and health systems.

Download the 2018-2023 report. In the new environment, leaders must stay abreast of the trends highlighted in Futurescan to successfully move ahead on the long road toward value-based healthcare.

As health care field changes become more complex, savvy board and executive leaders are intentionally increasing the time that their boards spend in robust discussions of strategic challenges and opportunities.

This diagnostic is designed to help boards and organization leaders identify challenges that may be impeding efforts to improve quality. Developed by Jim Conway, this resource draws on 20 years of personal governance experience as well as learning from the literature and the shared experience of trustees, executives, patients, family members, staff, teachers, and students.

As strategic planning becomes a more intense focus for hospital boards, lessons from publicly traded companies may be instructive.

As medical costs consume an ever increasing share of businesses’ profits, self-funded employers and public purchasers of health insurance are becoming more aggressive than ever before in direct contracting with providers.

The AHA’s 2017 report documents how leading health care organizations and their boards, in collaboration with other community partners, are beginning to expand efforts to addressthe myriad of social determinants that significantly affect the health of their communities.

Every day, health systems, hospitals and post-acute care (PAC) providers – such as longterm care hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, skilled nursing facilities and home health agencies – confront the daunting task of complying with a growing number of federal regulations.

The Triple Aim of improving the experience of care, improving the health of populationsand reducing per capita costs of health care is a nationally recognized goal that provides context for much of the work now underway to redesign existing systems for care, payment and collaboration to achieve better health outcomes for all Americans.

Because of this generation’s size and increasing influence, Millennials are being surveyed and studied to better understand what makes them tick and how they may play a role in fundamentally reshaping how we live, work—and govern—our organizations.

While most organizations conduct annual board self-assessments, it seems that few boards actually use the results of those assessments to develop specific plans for improvement. According to PriceWaterhouseCooper’s 2017 Annual Corporate Directors Survey, board members’ dissatisfaction with their fellow trustees has reached an all-time high.

With the recent rounds of health insurance company merger and acquisition activity, many hospital executives and their boards may be wondering if a provider-owned plan might make sense for them.

Recently, I sat in a board meeting of a leading U.S. health system as trustees were discussing their strategic vision for the system, and how the rapidly changing health care field, marketplace and regulations were having a profound impact on its future.

For a hospital board to be effective, it must first be engaged. Specifically, board members must actively and productively participate in the work of governing. This is absolutely vital in today’s health care environment, which is full of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

While most health care governing boards may still rely on paper packets and board agenda books for board and committee meetings, adoption of board portals— Web-based, online workspaces that support health care governance—appears to be catching up with use in other sectors.

More and more boards are adopting the practice of using competency-based criteria to select governing board members. They identify the subject areas and behavioral qualities needed from trustees and apply them to recruitment, orientation, leadership development, succession planning and periodic evaluation.