More than 40 top healthcare CEOs met recently with their peers to share leadership insights and strategy tips.
A host of CEOs and a few other senior healthcare leaders gathered together last week in Hot Springs, VA, for the invitation-only 2016 HealthLeaders Media CEO Exchange, and I was fortunate to be there as a moderator.
The mood has changed significantly among this group since the first event five years ago.
CEOs seem less beleaguered and more optimistic about the competitive landscape and their place within it. While that's a broad generalization, most senior leaders at the event were generally positive about the prospects for their organizations in the coming years.
Yet many still expressed frustration with the lack of cooperation from insurers and employers, among others, in helping to shift financial incentives in healthcare toward value-based principles.
Hospital CEOs to Physicians: Ride the Value-Based Wave or Wash Out
My observances could be skewed. The organizations represented at the Exchange are among the more forward-thinking in the country.
But I sensed a mood of frustration among senior executives who have largely embraced the idea that they need to move out of focusing exclusively on inpatient care and treating sicknesses that have developed over years, to embracing the idea that they should focus on health and prevention.
The problem: Employers and insurers, for different reasons, aren't buying into that vision fast enough, and competition is ramping up.
Here are several of the most insightful comments from top leaders of healthcare organizations nationwide about the competitive landscape and their struggle to get payers and employers to buy into the promise of greater value from a holistic healthcare vision:
1. Mark Herzog
President and CEO
Holy Family Memorial
Manitowoc, WI
"Our biggest competition is the poor match of the current broker-driven health insurance purchasing model with the needs of employers to innovate with providers to more intelligently use healthcare and lower long-term costs."
"This reinforces the status quo and inhibits understanding of Holy Family Memorial's value-driven approach. Even hard data and amazing results from a smaller provider in the market has a hard time getting noticed, and employers are leaving money and resources on the table."
2. Patricia Currie
President, Central Texas Operations
Baylor Scott & White Health
Dallas, TX
"We are facing competition from multiple players and industries, including Uber-like apps. We have been discussing [business] relationships with two such vendors. Regardless of who we choose, we fully expect the other to move into the market in competition with us. These apps will help us reach out to the patients in new ways, but payment mechanisms are still uncertain."
3. Jerry Fedele
President and CEO
Boca Raton Regional Hospital
Boca Raton, FL
"I don't worry so much about that competitor down the street, but I worry about technology. As younger patients who are more adept at technology use it to access care, it takes them out of the system not because it's necessarily any better system or better provider, but because there are incentives built in those apps that are not always in the patient's best interest. That really concerns me."
4. Kurt Barwis
President and CEO
Bristol Hospital and Health Care Group Inc.
Bristol, CT
"Marketing dollars flow from the bigger systems. Most of the billboards I see involve my competition in some way or another. I tell my staff and team it's very competitive and we can't just be as good as everybody else, we have to beat everyone else."
5. Bruce Elegant
President and CEO
Rush Oak Park Hospital
Chicago, IL
"Two or three years ago we would have said one of our top competitors was the big drugstore chains, but now they are getting out of the clinic business and selling it to the health systems."
6. John Phillips
President, Methodist Mansfield Medical Center
Mansfield, TX
"The good news is that we're in a strong market. But three and a half years ago we had zero freestanding EDs within a 15-mile radius of our hospital and last week the 14th opened."
7. Andre Boyd Sr.
Senior Vice President and CEO
Jackson North Medical Center
North Miami Beach, FL
"Competition is fierce in the Miami market. In addition to the large number of hospitals in the market, there is a significant amount of outpatient activity such as urgent care centers, ASCs, imaging centers, and freestanding ERs that continue to proliferate at a rapid pace. Given our mission at Jackson, which is to take care of everyone regardless of their ability to pay, we have to work diligently to compete for paying patients."
8. Patrick Charmel
President and CEO
Griffin Hospital
130 Division Street
Derby, CT
"You can drive 15 minutes in any direction from us and get to one of six hospitals that are larger and have more clinical capability than we do. Our belief is that we offer value in that we produce superior outcomes at a lower cost. So we were motivated to try to move the market more quickly to recognize value."
We did this by bringing together a group of hospitals that also offer better outcomes and lower cost into a Value Care Alliance. Initially, the market didn't appreciate our value proposition because insurers didn't differentiate high-value versus low-value providers in their plan design, nor did they educate health plan sponsoring employers and plan members about the differences."
"But now we've gotten to the point that we can go directly to employers and show them how they're being misinformed."
Philip Betbeze is the senior leadership editor at HealthLeaders.