Resource Library

Are You Prepared to Meet Today’s Governance Challenges? Serving on a community hospital or health care system board in today’s challenging environment takes more than the desire to fulfill a fiduciary duty.

Deeply held beliefs can blind boards to the true nature of change. It’s time to challenge the orthodoxies. In the early 2000s, the Nokia board debated creating a smartphone. The company’s wireless handset was the global best seller. Management believed consumers would not use a touch screen on a handset.

Lessons Learned from Foster G. McGaw Prize Recipients Community Partnership Profiles - Advances in Health Care Governance Series

This report discusses the complex challenges involved in community health improvement and makes the case for why health systems should take a substantial role in the multi-sector collaboration needed to achieve significant impact.

In July 2011, five national health associations jointly urged hospital and health system leaders to take three steps to help eliminate health disparities and improve quality of care. These steps called for increasing...

This monograph will focus on the Board’s role in plugging into how these processes are carried out within their organizations and on how the Board role is evolving. Among other things, we will address the characteristics of relationships among health care organizations and physicians that, if nurtured and respected, will enable the challenges of tomorrow to be more easily surmounted.

This publication discusses observations and trends about system development and identifies models of governance that are emerging as new organizations form and determine what it really means to become a system. It also reviews issues and obstacles that can arise as models of governance change and suggests steps boards can take to address them on the path toward more effective system governance.

Most boards I know were built by recruiting business leaders, physicians and clergy, and it’s important to have broad community representation among trustees. Increasingly, however, boards are recruiting new members by using a skills-based approach aligned with the organization’s strategic needs, including the need for information technology expertise. This is where “digital directors” come in.

Sound policy management can support the board’s risk and compliance oversight responsibilities

Executive and board support is needed for physician leadership that lasts. Collaborative leadership with physicians will be essential for hospitals to successfully create and maintain agile organizations that can compete in the rapidly changing healthcare landscape.

In some boardrooms, the topic of education for trustees elicits yawns, groans or even downright resistance. This may explain why findings from the AHA’s Center for Healthcare Governance 2014 National Health Care Governance Survey indicate a decline in every type of board education since the last survey...

Healthcare executive support can influence the value these organizations provide.

When trustees are appointed to the board of Manatee Memorial Hospital, they have a steep learning curve as they settle into this new role. Providing an orientation program and performing frequent performance evaluations help to ensure that trustees receive the training, resources and ongoing support they need to serve the organization.

Incentive compensation plans are intended to focus executives’ attention on their organizations’ most vital priorities and initiatives. As health care organizations revise their business strategies to address the ongoing transformation of care delivery and payment, health care boards also need to reassess the structure and measures of performance in their executive incentive compensation plans.

Succession planning is a high-stakes governance responsibility. The significant costs of protracted CEO searches and failed replacements are well-documented. Yet, data from the for-profit and nonprofit sectors continue to show that many boards aren’t focusing enough attention on succession planning or on getting it right.

This monograph offers guidance on proactively considering best practices in executive pay, including the changing role of incentive compensation, good governance practices to mitigate risk and choosing appropriate peer comparison data to support the compensation decision-making process.

A three-stage framework can help boards to identify information technology priorities

What if the typical hospital board meeting — multiple hours spent on endless pages of financial data, slide after slide of bullet points and little time left for meaningful discussion — could be more engaging and less time-consuming? With some planning and practice, boards and senior executives can make this happen.

In the new era of health care, hospital boards must consider a different kind of leadership style

The complexities inherent in performance-based contracts call for increased board oversight