3 Ways to Sharpen Your Entrepreneurial Strategies

Business lines in healthcare have developed according to the old reimbursement rules. Now leaders must work hard to develop an entrepreneurial culture if they are to survive and thrive.

Here at HealthLeaders, we just released our 2012 Healthcare Industry Survey, and we're quite proud of it. This is our fourth annual survey, and more than 1,000 of your colleagues donated a decent amount of their valuable time to share their insights with us.

The result is reams of free data on a variety of important trends and issues in healthcare. Anyway, I was looking over the CEO breakout survey, and something caught my eye in the context of a recent conversation I had with a consultant. We were talking about cultivating an air of innovation and culture of entrepreneurship in healthcare, which is undergoing rapid, some would say chaotic, change.

For the healthcare CEO, the risks of trying new business constructs have never been bigger. Then again, neither have the rewards.

According to the CEO report from the survey, the biggest strategic challenge facing hospital, health system, and physician group practice chief executives is care coordination and the continuum of care. This was chosen by 30% of respondents, ranking behind such big priorities as improving patient flow and patient experience, performance metrics, or hiring quality staff. It blew away reducing avoidable readmissions and complications too, for perspective.

Developing a culture, and at least as importantly, a system, for managing care coordination is foreign to healthcare organizations simply because it's never been required of them. Business lines in healthcare have developed according to the old reimbursement rules, which, never mind coordination of care, discouraged even coordination of businesses.