Resource Library

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.

These are exciting and challenging times for board members of not-for-profit health care organizations. The main driver of this state of affairs is a field-wide transformation that promises to result in better quality, higher value, and population health improvement. Most board members see this as a positive move for their organization and community, since their missions often speak to the need to improve the health of the communities they serve.

The following is intended to be an example that boards should adapt to meet their individual needs.

The following is intended to be an example that boards should adapt to meet their individual needs. Effective governance depends on the right mixture of skills, experience, personal qualities and diversity among the members of the hospital board.

This report shares findings from a study of governing physician organizations in developing systems of care. The study is among the first to explore this work from the perspective of physicians, who talk candidly about issues and challenges and provide insights about the evolution of physician involvement in governance and leadership at a historic moment of change in health care.

“No battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy,” goes a military saying, expressed in recent years by Colin Powell. The expression is worth remembering as hospitals and health systems embrace bold strategies to participate in the industry-wide economic shift from rewarding volume to holding providers accountable for the value they deliver.

New research on board structures, practices and culture in large nonprofit systems provides insight into how boards and CEOs are addressing the challenges of change — and changing the way they govern in the process. This workbook explores several themes emerging from review of system documents and 71 on-site interviews with CEOs and senior board leaders in 14 of the country’s 15 largest nonprofit health care organizations.

The AHA’s report on Hospitals and Care Systems of the Future is not intended to be one of those think tank documents that’s quickly forgotten when the next hot idea comes along. The report, which the AHA will update periodically to reflect changing conditions, is designed to help leaders engage in active, thoughtful exchanges about their desired delivery system of the future.

This chair position charter is grounded on a model of healthcare organization governance forwarded in Board Work by Dennis Pointer and James E. Orlikoff (Jossey-Bass,1999).

For boards to participate in shaping their new organization, they must be currently performing at an extremely high level. The following is a list of four practices that hospital and health system boards must be engaged in today, in order to be successful in the future.

A successful governance education process requires commitment, collaboration and consensus. This resource serves as an outline of how a board of trustees may design a process that will ensure optimum development of leadership knowledge and effectiveness.

To maintain the momentum of continuous governance improvement, many "best practices" boards institute regular mini-evaluations of board meetings. Here, each board meeting concludes with every board member anonymously completing a brief evaluation form of how the board planned for and used its time during the meeting.

While the board and management share overall responsibility for organizational leadership, essential duties can and must be clearly defined as either the board's or management's responsibility.

Effective decision making often requires different techniques or approaches for different types of decisions. The following techniques and practices can help support and strengthen your board’s decision-making processes.

The road to integration of hospitals and physicians has been a rocky one for many health care organizations. Failed attempts to integrate in the 1990s resulted from the realization that operating physician practices was very different from operating hospitals, leaving many health care providers wary of heading down the same road again.