Q&A: Nurse Leaders on Affecting Outcomes Through Leadership

Three nurse leaders from the Premier CNO Network, an organization made up of 235 CNOs from across the country that aims to promote networking, collaboration, advocacy, and peer-based learning share their views in an open-ended, roundtable discussion:

• Kathleen D. Davis, RN, MBA, Senior Vice President and CNO of Presbyterian Healthcare Services in Albuquerque, NM;
• Judy Watland, R.N., MSN, Senior Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer/Nurse Executive at O'Connor Hospital in San Jose, CA (part of Daughters of Charity Health System); and
• Carolyn C. Scott, RN, M.Ed, MHA, vice president of performance improvement/quality for the Premier Healthcare Alliance

This is the first of two parts; look for part two next week.

HLM: What should nurse leaders really be concentrating on now when it comes to healthcare reform?

Davis: I really think it's critical for nurse leaders to understand the changing reimbursement landscape and specifically how that relates to programs that are tied to the quality of care, and the experience of care.

And to understand that trajectory over time and how more and more of the work we're doing is subject to incentives or disincentives related to our performance.

HLM: What is coming up next? What are leaders worried about now?

Scott: What we're hearing a lot at Premier [that] in the first year of value-based purchasing calculations, it was core evidence-based, care-based metrics as well as patient experience.

In the next calculation, mortality comes into play. Last year you heard a lot of uproar or angst about the impact about patient experience, and as a country we haven't done really well across the board and it's really hard to hit the mark.

And we're hearing this year about the same kind of issues and the same kind of angst [from nurse leaders that] our mortality rates aren't what we hoped they would be, we really need some help in hitting the mark and understanding the impact of that.