New Breed of Hospital CEO Takes on Waste, Outcomes

In early 2000, Anderson says, he and the hospital's top leaders were exposed to the idea of family-centered care as the featured characteristic of better healthcare outcomes.

"Healthcare is dysfunctional and the opportunity to focus on processes to provide better value was a critical underdeveloped area, filled with enormous opportunity," says Anderson, who will retire at the end of the year.

OK, yes, it's a children's hospital. And adult hospitals face vastly different—some claim more difficult—challenges than their children's hospital counterparts. But that doesn't mean you can't learn plenty of lessons from their examples. Stay tuned. Next week I'll tell you more about the specifics of how Cincinnati Children's solved the problem of improving outcomes while still growing revenues at a 15%-a-year clip.

"We didn't intend to be ahead of our time," he says, "but the evidence just made such compelling argument."