Messages from Our Interviews with Healthcare Leaders

Messages from Our Interviews with Healthcare Leaders

01.10.14Robert Schaffer

Leaders in healthcare are finding they need to rapidly help their organizations adapt, change the way they work, and perform at a new level.

There is a perfect storm of challenges forming in healthcare – from the regulatory and reimbursement changes being driven by the Affordable Care Act, to the aging of the population, to the consistent increase in costs over the last few decades. Schaffer Consulting is meeting these challenges by implementing our results-driven approach to making change happen.

We have spoken with over 60 C-suite leaders in organizations such as MD Anderson Cancer Center, Yale New Haven Hospital, Providence Health Systems, and many others. We’ve heard some surprisingly consistent messages: Leaders in healthcare are finding they need to rapidly help their organizations adapt, change the way they work, and perform at a new level. The key needs we discovered can help your organization.

The key needs include:

  • Ensuring that integrations deliver on their intended value. There is a real need here as hospitals merge with one another, and as professional medical practices are absorbed into systems.

Schaffer has extended experience and capability in this area and can ensure that integrations quickly realize their business and cost objectives. Read one example.

  • Physicians need to expand their reach as leaders. As more physicians step into leadership roles, they need to reach across and inspire people from different disciplines and different departments, they must understand the financials of a health system, and they need to better understand how organizations work.

Schaffer has helped global organizations such as Siemens revolutionize their leadership development processes , turning leadership development from a cost center to a profit center. Learn how we used the same approach to help Stanford Hospital and Clinics.

  • Cost Reduction. The easiest, “low hanging fruit” costs in health care systems have been addressed for some time now. Now costs are harder to control, and many of them hide in processes that span functions and divisions in healthcare systems.

Schaffer’s WorkOut process can help organizations discover where these costs are hiding and remove them. Schaffer Consulting helped develop the GE WorkOut process and has used it to help transform other Fortune 500 companies. Learn how Schaffer helped a major pediatric hospital save millions of dollars.

  • Population Health Management. Managing the health of a large number of patients, improving care coordination across all care settings, raising the quality of care each patient receives, and applying this approach over a much longer period than a single episode of care is a huge – and costly – mandate. In many health systems, the sickest1% of patients drive 20%-30% of costs.

Schaffer Consulting’s Rapid-Results Approach is all about finding high leverage opportunities, and focusing on them to achieve breakthroughs. We can help create focus on high-cost patients and improve the quality of their care while helping the healthcare system save money. Read how we helped the country of Eritrea tackle the daunting spread of HIV/AIDS.

Our interviews confirmed that despite the apparent chaos surrounding health care today, leaders of health care systems are facing many similar challenges. By translating big, strategic issues like these into near-term challenges, getting very specific about needed outcomes, and then achieving them, healthcare organizations can create a sense of possibility, hope, and positive momentum for change while delivering critical results.

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