Stepping Up: What Future Healthcare Leadership Needs to Look Like

I had the wonderful privilege last month of being invited onto the podcast series “The Eye of the Needle,” presented regularly by the fabulous healthcare leader Pam Arlotto. Pam is the CEO of her own consulting firm, Maestro Strategies, and she regularly speaks with industry leaders about what’s going on in the industry right now.

And one of the topics that Pam and I discussed last month, and that she and I have been discussing literally for years now, was a major focus of our conversation on the podcast: that of leadership. What kind of leaders, and what kind of leadership, does the healthcare system need, in the coming years? The simple reality is this, and I’ve been talking about the “custodial mindset” of healthcare administration for years: a custodial mindset can no longer cut it, when it comes to leading hospitals, medical groups, and health systems. Hospitals and health systems are faced with intensifying financial demands, rising care delivery and supply costs, new “disruptor” entrants into care delivery, and the bottom-line reality of the aging of the population and the increasing explosion of chronic disease; leading as though everything can just continue as it has in the past, simply won’t work any longer—not if we want patient care organizations to continue to exist going forward.

And Pam and I have talked about CIOs 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0, and the same for all the titles in the c-suite. What does that mean? It means that the old ways in which the senior leaders with all those titles functioned, will no longer work. CIOs simply can’t be “order takers” and the people who keep the lights on and the computer stations running. Every member of the c-suite is going to have to “up their game,” and become a strategic partner to all of their colleagues. And it’s harder than it sounds.

Think, for instance, about the shift into value: there are countless possibilities for how to engage in value-based contracting, and every single flavor offers its particular opportunities and challenges. And the thing about value-based payment and care delivery is that it’s not just “one thing”—it’s many things. Obviously, any organization moving into value-based contracting will need terrific finance and contracting experts; but it will also need to transform its data analytics processes in order to be able to continuously evaluate how the organization—and its individual clinicians and components—are performing, clinically and financially speaking. Cue the CIO and CMIO and CNIO—working at a higher level than ever before.

What’s more, the set of issues around how to “grow” these updated patient care organization leaders is actually more complex than it appears at first sight. I mean, to break it down simply, if, say, a hospital’s entire current c-suite is made up of executives with no future-oriented vision and no sense of what needs to happen going forward to move into the future, how are those c-suite executives going to bring on the 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 executives they need in order to transform their organization? How would they even recognize the innovative leaders out there if they interviewed with them for jobs? One can see how complicated this gets.

During the podcast, Pam and I talked some about the new titles sprouting up: Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Transformation Officer, Chief Patient Experience Officer, and so on and so forth. We agreed that, of course, it’s a wonderful idea in the abstract, to hire or promote individuals into such positions. But do the executives hiring those individuals have a vision for what they’re expecting by creating those positions? And how are they supporting those individuals? As I noted, the worst possible outcome would be for a hospital to hire one individual to be “Chief Transformation Officer,” and then give that person no staff, no budget, no visibility, and no support. That would actually be worse than not hiring that position at all. Yet woefully few c-suites, we agreed, have firm concepts of what they’re expecting from those new-fangled positions. It really does take a whole-enterprise approach—even as the healthcare industry is facing the winds of change from the purchasers and payers of healthcare, who will no longer accept constant healthcare inflation without proof of value—meaning, better control of chronic disease management and higher levels of operational efficiency, among other things.

As I often note at our Summits, every year, the Medicare actuaries come out in June with their revised projections for total U.S. healthcare expenditures for the next several years. And this year, they projected that our U.S. healthcare system will grow in cost from its current $4.8-ish trillion in spending—already a staggering amount—to some $7.7 trillion annually, within the next eight years or so. That is simply mindblowing. And that projected increase in overall spending is providing a rock-solid “burning platform” for change.

But the leaders of patient care organizations nationwide will have to get a good grasp of the changes ahead, will have to create a vision their organizations going forward, and will have to populate their c-suites with individuals and teams who can take their organizations forward into the future. It’s all far more complex than it appears at first sight.

Fortunately, our industry has visionary leaders like Pam Arlotto, who not only see the future, but who know how to get there. And I’m excited to be able to note that Pam will be joining us in Nashville and Houston for our Summits there. Want to hear her share her thoughts live and in person? Now’s your opportunity. I know I’ll be ready to hear whatever wisdom she has to share. And as she always notes, we’re all in this together. Together, we can meet the future. It’ll just take some universal stepping up to the plate, is all.