Trustee Toolkit

AHA Trustee Services, in collaboration with Board First Consulting, provides a structured and efficient way to understand board performance across core dimensions of effective governance.

Use this self-assessment to evaluate your board’s readiness to recruit and develop the next generation of board members and leadership.

Hospitals and health systems create quality dashboards in different ways. Please see examples from two organizations.

Unlock better governance practices with our delegation of authority matrix template, ensuring clarity and accountability across your organization.

Tools for the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) team, including a review a sentinel event, to understand why the event happened, and to decrease or eliminate a like event from occurring again.

Doing your duty is not just about success; it is also about actively engaging in practices that promote good governance. Take this quiz to review and reflect on how your board compares with governance best practices.

By tracking outcomes, the committee can ensure that the program operates consistently with the established philosophy and that areas requiring attention are readily identified. When combined with comprehensive tally sheets and affirmation that all executive compensation arrangements are fully disclosed to the committee, there is a comprehensive baseline underlying the committee’s deliberations.

As health care organizations face a number of emerging challenges, the compensation committee of the not-for- profit hospital and health system board is well served to review and update the executive compensation program periodically.

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.

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.

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.

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 organization’s most important stakeholders have been identified/specified. A descriptive/analytic profile has been prepared for each key stakeholder. The interests (needs/wants, expectations and organizational success criteria) of each stakeholder have been documented.

A physician compact outlines the organization's and physician's responsibilities. Reprinted with permission from Virginia Mason Medical Center.

Organizations pursuing Baldrige recognition must demonstrate how they carry out their governance in eight areas of responsibility.

Hospital and health system boards and leadership can advance their understanding of population health and how population health management fits into organizational priorities by considering the following questions.

Hospital and health system boards and leadership can advance their understanding of telehealth and how it fits into organizational priorities by considering the following questions.

CEO goal-setting and evaluation is a fundamental responsibility of a governing board. These questions are designed to help boards assess their CEO evaluation process and determine if any improvements are necessary.