Kevin McCune, MD, is the chief physician executive at Alexandria, Va-based American Medical Group Association (AMGA) Consulting.
Dr. McCune will serve on the panel "Risk-Based Contracting: Identify and Tackle the Real Roadblocks" at Becker's 10th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference on Nov. 7-10 in Chicago.
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Becker's Healthcare aims to foster peer-to-peer conversation between healthcare's brightest leaders and thinkers. In that vein, responses to our Speaker Series are published straight from interviewees. Here is what our speakers had to say.
Question: What is the smartest thing you've done in the last year to set your system up for success?
Dr. Kevin McCune: The smartest thing I've done was help create togetherness with my colleagues at AMGA. We're creating sustainable, scalable, successful models of the physician enterprise. We've identified seven domains. We believe that each of these domains needs to be optimized and relative to each other to drive success.
What's exciting about it is that it's collaborative, so organizations are learning from each other. We have a collaborative model where organizations come together after the first round of assessment. An assessment is performed, and then they come together. They share their results from that assessment and learn from each other so that together they can continue to improve, to achieve resilience and excellence in the care of our patients. It's very metric-driven. There are 130 or so measures; half are qualitative and the other half are quantitative. It's very much driven based on the metrics and benchmarking, ultimately to model those benchmarks, to ask the question, how is it that we're performing? How can we perform more effectively?
Q: What are you most excited about right now and what makes you nervous?
KM: I am excited about this work because our organizations have rapidly grown. There has been significant consolidation within the healthcare systems. I think the study of that is just beginning. There's been a lot of work over the last 20 years, but we're at an exciting point where there has been enough standardization and coordination within systems, making it a perfect time to dive deeply into this.
What makes me nervous is whether our systems will have the focus that's necessary on the physician enterprise to go about this heavy lift, to understand how the physician enterprise is working within their organization or as an independent medical group and how they are benchmarked relative to each other. The challenge of managing these large groups with commitments and pressures around them is to make this an area of focus. I believe that some of these leaders would be eliminated in making this an area of focus. So, it brings focus to what's important.
Q: How are you thinking about growth and investments for the next year or two?
KM: I think about investment in how our organizations, the physician enterprise, work and function and optimize those processes. I like to think of technology, people, and processes and how those three come together. There is a tremendous opportunity to invest in how those processes come together, particularly to drive efficiency. For example, how do we manage the relationship with a patient across the continuum, using technology to bring that patient to the next level of care and optimize that level of care effectively and efficiently?
Q: What will healthcare executives need to be in order to be effective leaders for the next five years?
KM: For healthcare executives to be effective, they must have a questioning attitude and be open to new ideas and how we work together. It will require a substantial degree of inquisitiveness, inquiry, and flexibility in changing how we work.
Q: How are you building resilient and diverse teams?
KM: Within our modeling, we believe that diversity is key because to care for the populations we serve, our team members need to reflect the populations that we serve. In building out what we call the high-performing physician enterprise collaborative, we are focused on how to optimize all of the parts, ultimately to achieve the goals in healthcare, which is to drive better care for the communities, meeting all of their needs but certainly doing so with a focus on value and managing to all, but only what's necessary to achieve the best outcomes in their healthcare.