When it comes to tackling hospital leadership challenges such as staffing, finances, regulatory issues and growing payer-space complexity, CEOs often rely on advice from peers and former CEOs.
Recently, Becker's asked, what's a challenge that led you to seek advice from a fellow CEO and what key insights did you gain from the conversation?
Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Rob Allen. President and CEO of Intermountain Health (Salt Lake City): It's always helpful to collaborate with my peers at other organizations. But perhaps another option that should be considered is maintaining open relationships with those that have filled our role previously. My experience has been that they almost always have great insight into today's challenges because their challenges were much the same as ours. I've found that keeping in touch and reaching out to the former CEOs of Intermountain Health has been invaluable and very helpful — I greatly appreciate their wisdom and advice.
Brian Erling, MD. President and CEO of Renown Health (Reno, Nev.): I find great value in networking and connecting with other healthcare CEOs and learning about the challenges they are facing. Recently, the majority of the conversation has been around the payer space. Renown is an integrated health system with a health plan, and so understanding all of the challenges in the different spaces, in particular Medicare Advantage, has been interesting as we have a vantage point on both sides of that discussion. One thing is certain from those conversations, we are only going to see more Medicare Advantage in the coming years, and we need to find a way for it to work for both the payers and the providers, and most importantly for the patients.
Lydia Watson, MD. President and CEO of MyMichigan Health (Midland): I am very fortunate to sit on the Michigan Health and Hospital Association board. There are many other leaders from around the state involved in the association. Some are CEOs, some are CMOs, some are CFOs, or administrative officers with different titles. And the question that has been top of mind for many of us — and we're all asking each other what our organizations are doing, and perhaps even considering doing something on a larger scale together down the road — is addressing cybercrime and cyber liability. It's scary. It is keeping all of us up at night.
What I have taken away from it is that it is very important for us to understand that it's not a matter of if it's going to happen, but that there is a very high chance it will happen. So, how are we going to manage it when it happens? And so what we are trying to do is learn from other organizations as to how well were you prepared, what were the gaps in being able to address things quickly and promptly, and what learnings did you have that you'd be willing to share with us so that we can prepare. All organizations do tabletop exercises and downtime exercises, but it's very rare to do a full-scale drill in the middle of the day. That is something that we are planning on doing, because that's real-time, and you will be able to see what you are really prepared for and what are your opportunities to improve. So, when the [incident] does happen, we are not only going to have employees who will feel comfortable about what they need to do next and know who to go to and where to go to get things headed in the right direction, but it will also be more likely to prevent harm to our patients.
I think one of the biggest surprises — it shouldn't have been a surprise, but that's why it is nice to talk to others who have gone through it — is that, especially coming out of COVID, we have a lot of new young employees, both clinical and non-clinical, and providers, and many of them have never functioned in a hospital or in a practice not on an electronic medical record. And so as soon as all your systems go down, including potentially your telephone services, how are you going to page a doctor if there's a code? How are you going to write orders if you can't put them into the computer? How are you going to get lab specimens taken down to the lab if you haven't put orders through the EMR? So we are preparing to do a big drill and go through all of those things to make sure that we're ready to deal with it when it happens.