Healthcare CEOs Focusing on the Now

Banner Health, for example, spent big bucks on driving quality at their organization. They don't regret it. In fact, their quality scores in the obstetrics department recently meant they could reduce their reserves for malpractice to near zero for 2010. But it took at least three years of low or no claims to make the actuarial team comfortable with reducing those reserves and letting them flow to the bottom line.

CEOs in 2010 don't necessarily have that luxury of waiting for results, no matter how impressive they might eventually be. And that's the key for CEOs in 2010. They want to expend their energy on initiatives that bring immediate or near-immediate return because frankly their jobs, the jobs of others in the organization, and in some cases, their hospital's existence, are on the line.

Obviously, this is just very narrow snapshot of the wealth of information available in our survey. I encourage you to spend a half-hour on it in the next week or so. We've broken the results down by pillar, meaning there's one for CEOs, one for quality, one for CFOs, etc.

I've focused here on one question from the CEO pillar and have been able to draw several conclusions from it. But there's a story behind every question and knowledge to be gleaned from every pillar. Delve into the survey's findings now. You won't be sorry.

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