The health system CEO mindset is changing to meet the unique stresses and opportunities for healthcare organizations today.
CEOs have spent the last four years managing COVID-19 surges, workforce shortages, rapid digital transformation and financial upheaval. They transformed their organizations quickly during an unprecedented global pandemic and then led the charge through recovery and building an even stronger foundation for the future.
What will the most effective healthcare leaders need to succeed in the next few years?
"What I tell my team and what I push the organization to do, it is very important for us to understand that we can't expect the world to go back the way it was in 2019," Joon Lee, MD, CEO of Atlanta-based Emory Healthcare, said on an episode of the "Becker's Healthcare Podcast." "The healthcare industry is forever changed. It also means that we have to be a different type of high functioning leadership team. What that means is that we have to be more adept and be more nimble than you would expect from a large organization like us."
Dr. Lee said the leadership mindset shift requires his team to function more as an organized system to thrive, especially amid growing complexities in healthcare.
"What I call systemness is critically important," he said.
For Rob Allen, CEO of Intermountain Health in Salt Lake City, that shift is focused on partnerships.
"There's a lot of insular work that's going on, to good outcomes in many cases," he said on an episode of the "Becker's Healthcare Podcast." "But in the world today, we have to partner, and so the mindset for me is partnership."
He started by collaborating with the health system's 66,000 clinicians and caregivers to find areas for improvement. The health system also partnered for telehealth and virtual care benefiting both rural and urban hospitals and patients. Finally, Mr. Allen is focused on identifying the right technology partnerships.
"Technology is evolving so fast, I don't believe any organization can stay on top of the change that's needed by themselves," said Mr. Allen. "We are looking more and more as to who are the partners out there that we can connect with? Who are the partners that can bring strength to our mission that are aligned with what we're trying to do, and how do we strengthen each other by working together?"
Trevor Wright, CEO of Loma Linda (Calif.) University Health Hospitals, said the most effective leaders need a resilient mindset more than anything else.
"No matter how good a day is or how bad a day is, or how challenging things may be, we will be able to work through them and get to the other side," said Mr. Wright on an episode of the "Becker's Healthcare Podcast." "A subset of that really is perseverance, staying at something even when it feels like you're maybe not making progress as fast as you want to or need to for the good of the organization, for the good of the workforce, for patients."
There are no easy answers in healthcare leadership, especially as workforce shortages and thin margins persist. Innovative leaders are taking a chance with new technology and creative partnerships, which might not work right away. But given time and space to refine, these efforts could make a big difference in the organization's future trajectory.
"Figure out how to navigate challenges that don't have easy solutions," said Mr. Wright. "Perseverance is probably one of the single most important things in order to be able to continue to try and push ahead rather than just accept things as they may be."
Omar Lateef, president and CEO of Rush Health in Chicago, said top health system leaders will need to focus on data to effectively guide their organizations through the complexities of healthcare. They'll need to know their numbers, be transparent with their teams and embrace learning from failures.
"As a leader, we have to be transparent with our organizations around the challenges that we face and tell them the truth," said Mr. Lateef on an episode of the "Becker's Healthcare Podcast." "Not everything is going to be perfect, but here's why. If we spend time on that and we get people on the team to start developing solutions, you really start to evolve towards a better ratio of change."
Dr. Lee also sees technology and data as critically important.
"No matter what industry you're in, almost everyone of the leading organizations are heavily analytics driven," he said. "So I concentrate my leadership team and organization on three aspects. How do we stay nimble? How do we create a system that really functions as a system to deliver high quality care, have efficiency, and third, in order to do that, we're going to have to be analytics driven."