Nearly one-third of health system and hospital executives do not feel their current senior management team has members with the experience, skill sets and talent needed to achieve strategic priorities.
The finding is one of many from the American Hospital Association's latest survey, "Building a Leadership Team for the Health Care Organization of the Future."
Although most executives (68 percent) do believe their team has the skill and experience needed to meet priorities, more than half of the survey respondents identified a number of gaps in their organizations' capabilities.
These include experience in leading nontraditional health partnerships, such as joint ventures or partnerships with payers and retailers (54 percent), community and population health management (48 percent) and change management (41) percent. Another 37 percent of CEOs said their organization lacked "advanced financial expertise."
"Some talent gaps are being addressed by training or expanding the roles of current executives," the report states, as CMOs, CNOs, CFOs and COOs are being asked to develop broader sets of skills to increase their understanding of healthcare delivery.
"However, some of these gaps are being addressed through the addition of new executive team positions to lead and galvanize support for initiatives in top strategic areas," according to the report. After all, 60 percent of survey respondents said the senior-management team of their organization is larger today than it was three years ago.
Findings are based on responses to an online survey of more than 1,100 executives, 95 percent of whom were CEOs and 5 percent of whom were strategy executives with their organizations. The majority of respondents worked with health systems or community hospitals.
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