Resource Library

Board Support New Positions Focus on Care and Management Job Description Includes Recruitment, Orientation and Involvement By Joel F. Emrich Board management is demanding work. Add the complexity of hospitals, health systems and humans into the mix and the demands only rise over time.

Board Responsibilities Participation is Not Optional A board that engages 100% of its membership results in effective governance By Kimberly A. Russel Are there members of your board who never speak during board meetings?

While continuing to respond to the COVID-19 crisis, hospital and health system boards can use this experience to strengthen leadership, engagement and trust.

Up-to-date, clearly written and concisely constructed bylaws can support oversight of current performance and enable an organization to nimbly confront challenges to its viability.

This is a sample committee charter: people and culture committee.

The governance challenges raised in the post-Enron environment are motivating many boards and their general counsels to draft new board policies and tighten up existing ones.

In most professions, there are clear and relatively consistent pathways along one’s career continuum, as well as clearly defined experiential and educational requirements. Not so with health care governance staffing, which ranges from board support provided by a CEO’s assistant all the way to a comprehensive governance support staff led by a senior vice president/chief governance officer.

Some 66 percent of U.S. hospitals are now part of health systems, according to 2016 survey data from the American Hospital Association. As systems continue to grow in scope and complexity, their governance often follows suit.

From time to time as provided in the bylaws, the Board may designate the Vice Chairperson as a Chair-Elect. In such cases, the Chair-Elect’s responsibilities go beyond the usual role of a Vice Chair to lead the board in the Chairperson’s absence. The responsibilities of a Chair Elect include...

The role of the board is to govern, not manage, the organization. To that end, the board carries out four roles.

Learn about the role of the Chief Governance Officer in hospital trustee boards and how effective governance is crucial in ensuring quality processes and patient safety.

Hospital boards are beginning to take best practice cues from their corporate counterparts and modernize their communication methods by adopting board portals. A board portal is a secure “host”— i.e., an online storage system for managing trustee communications.

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

Many governing boards are frustrated because most board meetings and committee meeting agendas are so full of both important and routine business that little time is left over for interactive discussion and questions concerning highly significant or future-oriented strategy and policy issues.

Spotty attendance at board and committee meetings used to be little more than a chronic nuisance, but with governance standards rising, boards are getting more serious about attendance. When a third or more of board seats are vacant or a few members are habitually absent, how can the board be fully informed, raise tough questions and reach independent conclusions as a group?