New media is a trend that is here to stay. However, many facilities are unsure of the steps to take to incorporating new media and what might be right for their facilities. Elizabeth Scott, associate vice president of marketing and eBusiness for Norton Healthcare, talks about some of the specific factors facilities should consider before embarking on a new media strategy. This topic will be discussed in more detail in the April Marketing Webcast Beyond the Blog: Communicate and connect with today's healthcare consumers.
The University of Michigan recently released a study that shows people are happy with their HMO as long as there are other health plan choices, such as a PPO. Richard Hirth, professor of health management and policy at the University of Michigan, talks about the findings and what it should mean for health insurers.
Medicare is a multitrillion-dollar problem that's about to get dramatically worse, and one that nobody--especially the Presidential candidates--wants to talk about, says Fortune senior editor Geoff Colvin. In this piece, Colvin contends the issue is a huge threat to not just the healthcare industry, but the entire U.S. economy.
A year after announcing a preliminary merger deal, merging two of the largest hospitals in Northern Kentucky is proving more difficult than expected. St. Elizabeth Medical Center and St. Luke Hospitals are still trying to satisfy federal regulators that the combination wouldn't give them monopoly powers. Representatives from both hospitals are confident the merger will be approved, and say that although the combination would dominate Northern Kentucky it would hold only about 15 percent market share in the entire region.
During his 28 years at Harvard Medical School, Benjamin Sachs, MD, helped launch a network of clinics to deliver a combination of primary and preventive healthcare to poor Boston residents. Sachs, who is now dean of Tulane University's medical school, is preparing for establishing a similar system in New Orleans. In Boston, about 200,000 people are treated each year at 25 community clinics. The neighborhood centers are designed to treat problems before they become major, and more expensive. Participants are referred to doctors if they need specialized care.
This flu season has been creating a tough time for Kansas City-area hospitals and the patients they treat. Emergency rooms have been packed and waiting times have extended into hours due to an influx of both flu patients and those with other respiratory infections. Hospitals have been forced to tell ambulances to pass them by because they're out of room.
About this time of year, as the March 27 deadline looms for the annual Top Leadership Teams in Healthcare program, I start to get questions from prospective entrants on what the secret is to winning a Top Leadership Teams in Healthcare designation.
Here is the secret.
There is no secret.
Our panel of judges is simply looking for the best in senior-level leadership teamwork at a hospital, health plan and medical group practice. Teamwork is too often misinterpreted as a situation in which its members get along well or exist on "team chemistry." Those are qualities that are present on outstanding teams, but truly outstanding leadership teams are more about putting the right talent together and achieving the goals set out by the team.
So our judges look for:
Teamwork exhibited among an organization's senior leaders to achieve stated operational goals/objectives
How a senior leadership team works together to effectively overcome any challenges/barriers encountered along the way to reaching its goals/objectives
The success of senior leadership in meeting the team's goals/objectives
Beyond the official rules, there are some consistent threads that we have seen among the winning Top Leadership Teams, now in its fifth year.
Consistency--Many of the winning Top Leadership Teams have had their core of senior leaders together for a period of several years, as many of the worthwhile goals in healthcare take as long to achieve.
No tolerance for silos--Winning Top Leadership Teams have found ways to break down traditional silos and barriers that can block healthcare organizations from achieving their goals.
Strong at the top, but not dominant--Winning leadership teams have highly-effective CEOs. But we have found that almost every winner over the first four years has had a CEO who delegated key strategic responsibilities to top team members, held them accountable for achieving these goals, but ultimately stayed out of the way.
Transparent--Winning teams in healthcare have to be transparent about what they are doing, who is doing it, and how success or failure is measured. Transparency is a core value that the Top Leadership Teams program is meant to encourage.
Be a quality organization--While the Top Leadership Teams in Healthcare Award is intended to recognize outstanding leadership teamwork, we do recognize that outstanding leadership teams lead outstanding organizations. Healthcare organizations that are embroiled in scandal need not apply.
One of the most rewarding aspects to the program has been the number of entrants over the years who told us how rewarding it was just to go through the exercise of articulating their leadership teamwork. We have also found over the years that teams often win on their second or third try as they are able to demonstrate the leadership teamwork over a longer time frame.
We encourage all hospitals, health plans and medical groups who feel like they have the teamwork to make healthcare better to apply for the program at www.topleadershipteams.net. Deadline for entries is March 27.
Well-known speaker, author and consultant Quint Studer has helped hospitals reinvent their leadership cultures with his techniques for evidence-based leadership. In his latest book Results That Last, Studer takes the principles learned from healthcare and translates them into applications for other industries. Studer sat down with HealthLeaders Media Editor-in-Chief Jim Molpus to talk about ways to make success last.
During his keynote speech last week at HIMSS conference, Steven Case made one very pointed observation. When it comes to managing their own healthcare, the AOL founder said, "consumers have shirked their responsibilities. It is their responsibility to take more responsibility for their own health." That's a concept you don't hear much at healthcare conferences, particularly those with an IT focus like HIMSS. But Case has a good point. For many consumers, healthcare is something that is done to them, not something they participate in actively.
It's a model that Case would like to turn on its head with his new company, the ambitiously named Revolution Health. During his brief commentary (Case graciously left plenty of time for audience questions), he described the problems besetting the industry of rising cost and pernicious clinical problems, such as the obesity epidemic. In Case's view, consumerism is an inevitable force in healthcare, especially given the assumption that we patients will be asked to foot an increasingly bigger chunk of the cost in the days ahead. His new venture hopes to seize on this momentum, offering online content and connectivity services that are consumer-centric. Among the services is a personal health record, a technology space that is rapidly becoming crowded.
His thinking is that, if consumers take charge of their own health record, and that record is buttressed by various healthcare alerts, then they surely will become healthier, and sidestep many of the chronic lifestyle conditions that confront physicians and nurses every waking moment. In that sense, Case does have a "revolutionary" view of the medical record. Medical records should not be passive, but rather should stimulate activity on the part of the consumer, he said. "We want to build a health reminder system, as opposed to being in the file cabinet business."
In my mind, there's no doubt that unless consumers start accepting responsibility for managing their own health, we will continue to be hampered by burgeoning waistlines, rising cholesterol counts, and vexing health issues. I do question whether the mere presence of an electronic alert would be enough to prod people into healthier behavior. However, as electronic devices work their way into the homes, and as consumers start dispatching clinical data from those devices to their caregivers, I can easily imagine a type of "Hawthorne effect" setting in. If patients know they are being watched, they might very well change their behavior, and keep their weight at the right level.
Case has his share of critics, and he freely conceded that to many in the industry, he is a naïve outsider. There is some truth to that. He is wandering into a thicket of third-party payers, disconnected IT systems and convoluted organizational structures. But as Case recalled, he faced similar skepticism during the early days of AOL. Back then, the idea that the Internet would become a ubiquitous component of modern life was not held by many. Nobody dreamed our nation would become so rotund either.
P.S. Thanks to the scores of providers and vendors who e-mailed before (and during) HIMSS, inviting me to hear their presentations, see demonstrations at their booths, or simply meet in person. There were simply too many invitations to oblige everyone, but I had many productive encounters. On the HealthLeaders Media Technology pillar page, you will find links to a few of the stories I filed during HIMSS. Under "Top Stories" you will find links to other non-HIMSS stories (yes, they do exist!) that appeared last week. Next week, I will provide some additional wrap-up and commentary on the goliath HIMSS show.
The board of trustees for the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems has adopted guidelines to ensure that no patient or payer foots the bill for hospital care related to adverse medical events. The list of qualifying adverse events includes operating on the wrong body part, performing the wrong surgical operation on a patient, inadvertently leaving a foreign object inside a surgery patient and administering the wrong blood type to a patient.
