About 85% of the marketing materials that private insurers use for their prescription-drug plans fail to meet all of Medicare's guidelines for those products, according to federal auditors. The marketing products in question include enrollment applications for the Medicare drug benefit as well as explanations of a plan's benefits and rules. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has dozens of requirements for how the information is supposed to be presented to the elderly and disabled, and auditors found that the materials routinely violated at least one of those requirements.
A leadership culture is not something you can buy off the shelf. It takes nurturing and development. At the beginning of the decade, San Diego-based Scripps Health—the 2008 Top Leadership Team in Healthcare honoree for large hospitals—had as many different leadership cultures as they had hospitals.
"The five Scripps hospitals were operating as silos. In fact, they were competing against each other," says Scripps Health CEO Chris Van Gorder, who took over the helm of the system in 2001. "Management and staff at each hospital thought their 'cultures' and 'missions' were the best as well as their policies, procedures and systems. There was very little interaction between management teams and very little sharing of best practices and system expertise. In addition, there was really no "Scripps Culture"—just a group of different cultures all appropriate for their local markets."
Van Gorder started to see another sign: promotions at the senior level were almost always being given to external candidates. The path to fix both issues was to create the Scripps Leadership Academy, a group of mostly middle-managers who started to meet monthly to talk about common challenges.
"I needed to find a way to bring the organization together. I did not believe that was possible by focusing just on senior leadership. My hypothesis was that I could bring our middle management together starting with 20 participants in the first year, another 20 the second year and so on. My hope was that it would create a powerful group of 'change agents' dedicated to building a system culture by demanding more from their supervisors and delivering more to their subordinates."
The meetings themselves started with an open Q&A, with the CEO answering whatever questions were asked (except for personnel issues which could not legally be discussed in an open group). Transparency was the first ingredient to build trust. "I wanted the Academy to understand how the organization really worked-why decisions were made the way they were—and what was going on behind the scenes. Over a few months, each class became more trusting and comfortable asking very direct and pointed questions. And each month their understanding of the organization grew as did their leadership skills."
Each year the leadership academy takes in more applications than they can fill for the number of slots. An "alumni association" of past members has formed that now contributes by organizing a system wide social event and a series of leadership lectures. The Scripps system has benefited from the sense of cooperation among rising leaders, and at the same time created a pipeline for executives to grow.
"I fully anticipate one or more of our future hospital chief executives and corporate senior executives will come from the graduates of the program," Van Gorder says. "Most accept the concept of continual leadership and management education both internally and externally. Several have decided to go back to college for their graduate degrees."
The Scripps Leadership Academy is just one of the solutions for healthcare leadership that will be shared at the annual Top Leadership Teams in Healthcare Conference, Oct. 16-17 at The Drake Hotel in Chicago. Some 40 senior-level healthcare leaders will share hard-earned, practical solutions to many of healthcare's current leadership challenges. For more information or registration, go to: www.topleadershipteams.net.
California lawmakers acted to curb some of the most extreme practices of the state's healthcare industry this session, but failed to fix some widespread problems such as high costs and uneven quality. The Legislature's two-year session resulted in incremental tinkering with California's healthcare system instead of the wholesale restructuring that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger dedicated himself to shortly after reelection. After the Senate rejected the governor's $14.9-billion plan in January, healthcare advocates hoped that improvements could be enacted. But aggressive lobbying by insurers and doctors and internal feuds among Democrats killed most of the proposals in the final weeks of the session, which ended without a budget in place.
A survey by the Mercer consulting firm has found 59% of companies intend to keep down rising healthcare costs next year by raising workers' deductibles, copays or out-of-pocket spending limits. On average, healthcare costs will go up by an estimated 5.7% in 2009 for both workers and their employers, the study found. That repeats this year's 5.7% increase and a 6.1% jump in 2007.
Uninsured patients being treated at St. Louis-based BJC Healthcare hospitals could pay less for services under a proposed class-action settlement between the hospital system and a group of its uninsured patients. A judge was scheduled to give final approval, but several other members of the suit have filed objections to the settlement. They say the ruling does little to address the excessive prices billed to patients without insurance. Concerns include that self-pay discounts of 25% are insufficient considering the underlying charge can be three times what an insured patient might be billed.
Tampa (FL) General Hospital’s plan to fix safety problems in its psychiatric unit has been approved by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Regulators identified the problems after two patients committed suicide in the psych ward in July, and investigators have been at the hospital reviewing the improvements. Tampa General will post its improvement plan on its Web site once the plan has received final approval.
People living in the most deprived areas of England are less likely to survive cancer, according to government figures. Cancer patients in poor areas of the country have less chance of being alive five years after diagnosis, according to the national statistics office. Its study of National Health Service trusts in England found "significantly lower" survival rates for both men and women across a range of cancers in the 62 most deprived areas of the country.
The WHAS Crusade for Children has given $1.4 million to Louisville, KY-based Kosair Children's Hospital to be applied toward the upgrade of a pediatric cardiac catheterization lab and an $18.4 million expansion and renovation of the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit. The Children's Hospital Foundation matched the funds to help the hospital move closer to its fund-raising goals, Kosair said in a news release. The gifts also allowed Kosair to purchase an operating room monitoring system and neurosurgical equipment.
Patient care costs increased by less than 1% between 2005 and 2006—prior to that, the average increase had been about 5.3% annually. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, nearly 47% of overall cost increases was the result of hightened intensity of hospital care.
