Top 5 CMO Trend Stories of 2024

At HealthLeaders, the top CMO trend stories of this year focused on care team composition, deprescribing, 'medspeak,' physician onboarding, and physician leadership development.

As part of our CMO coverage, HealthLeaders has published more than two dozen trend articles this year. The following are the Top 5 CMO trend stories of 2024 (click on the headline link to read the full story):

1. The Ending of the Physician Era. Begin the Age of the APP.

It's time for physician leaders to say the unspoken part out loud: There will never be enough physicians. And even if you can find them and keep them, it is difficult to pay all of them.

The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that in the next 12 years, the U.S. will be short 86,000 physicians, with more than half of those being primary care physicians. The future is a zero-sum game, where the clinical need of an aging population runs up against falling numbers of physicians.

To fill those gaps, health systems and hospitals are elevating advanced practice providers and giving them more responsibilities. The resulting change in care team design is forcing CMOs and other executives to think about how they manage their physicians to ensure a productive workplace and positive clinical outcomes.

Since this shift, CMOs have begun to wonder whether they need as many physicians as they thought, especially since the APPs are sometimes carrying out the majority of the tasks.

This begs the question, is it time for CMOs to scale back their physicians and usher in more APPs instead? While the question is in part written in jest, it doesn’t mean there aren't pros and cons to considering APP-lead teams.

2. How Medication Management Can Cut Admissions, ICU Stays

For patients on multiple medications, deprescribing is a key strategy to promote patient safety and care quality.

The primary risk with multiple medications is medication interactions. This risk can lead to an increase or decrease in the effects of medications as well as undesired effects and side effects.

Cost and waste are other considerations, according to Karna Patel, MD, MPH, vice president at Tampa General Hospital and president of Tampa General Medical Group.

"As you add more medications, there is more cost to pay for those medicines," Patel says. "Globally, prescribing multiple medications can lead to waste of pharmaceuticals."

When assessing patients on multiple medications, clinic visits and visits in other healthcare settings are an opportunity to go over a patient's medication list, according to Patel.

"At that time, we want to make sure all the medications the patient is taking are appropriate for their conditions," Patel says. "We also check for interactions. That is a great time to try to deprescribe or consolidate medications."

3. How Clinicians Can Avoid 'Medspeak' When Communicating With Patients

For clinicians, communicating in a clear and understandable manner is crucial for providing quality care.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 12% of U.S. adults are highly proficient in health literacy.

"Medspeak" is characterized as medical terminology used by clinicians that leads to communication gaps with patients. Medspeak gets in the way of effective shared decision-making for clinicians and patients.

There are several steps clinicians can take to make sure they communicate medical terminology and procedures effectively, and it's the CMO's job to make sure their clinicians are aware of medspeak and how to avoid it.

"The jargon, the abbreviations, and the terms we use in medicine seem natural to clinicians, but patients often do not understand these terms," says Donald Whiting, MD, CMO of Allegheny Health Network and president of Allegheny Clinic. "Clinicians can fly through an explanation without getting the patient engaged, then leave them behind."

4. How CMOs Should Onboard Physicians Using a Systematic Approach

Onboarding is about more than helping clinicians navigate the hiring process.

According to the Physician and Clinician Onboarding Research Report by the Association for Advancing Physician and Provider Recruitment (AAPPR), successful onboarding programs integrate clinicians into an organization, acquaint clinicians with an organization's culture, and provide clinicians with resources and support to help them excel in their new role. AAPPR compiled this data from a survey conducted in collaboration with Jackson Physician Search and LocumTenens.com.

Providing effective clinician onboarding is pivotal in a health system's success, according to Pranav Mehta, MD, MBA, CMO of HCA Healthcare American and Atlantic Groups. HCA Healthcare, which features more than 180 hospitals, has more than 45,000 employed and affiliated physicians.

"It is critically important that we orient those physicians in a systematic way and approach," Mehta says. "We spend time onboarding them as they come from outside of our organization into our practices. That gives us the ability to make sure they are successful in clinical practice."

5. CMO: Physician Leadership Development Involves Formal and Informal Efforts

Physician leadership development is pivotal for the U.S. healthcare system because many of the top-performing hospitals are physician-led.

Research shows there is a gap between physician interest in leadership development and opportunities to gain this experience.

A report from Jackson Physician Search and the Medical Group Management Association found that 67% of physicians surveyed were interested in leadership development opportunities, but only 18% had been exposed to nonclinical leadership development through their education or experience in clinical practice.

It is essential for health systems and hospitals to offer leadership development opportunities, says Kristin Mascotti, MD, MS-HQSM, CPE, CMO of Penrose Hospital, which is part of CommonSpirit Health's Mountain Region.

At CommonSpirit, there are formal and informal leadership development opportunities for early career and mid-career physicians who have shown influence in their department or on committees, according to Mascotti.

"It is vital to provide physicians with leadership development opportunities," Mascotti says. "Some of the best-performing healthcare centers and hospitals in the nation are physician-led."