Session Descriptions
Opening Session
Leadership Development
Research has clearly shown a link between certain specific leadership competencies (including team management skills, communication, tolerance for ambiguity, and conflict management) and achieving the highest levels of performance. Individuals do best when they identify their strengths and learn how to "play to them," rather than spending inordinate amounts of time trying to overcome their weaknesses. This session focuses on personal growth and change using self-assessment instruments, experiential exercises, and case examples. The course concludes with a set of goals and priorities for developing and implementing a positive action plan focused on each participant's strengths that is linked to personal and career objectives.
Competitive Landscape: Industry Analysis
To formulate competitive strategy, a manager needs to understand the industry landscape and the important players affecting the firm's profitability. In today's health care environment, managers must optimize their own organizations' strengths. Critically, managers must understand that competitive strategy defines what an organization does and what it cannot do. This module explores frameworks to analyze the competitive structure of health care and competitive strategy trade-offs.
Competitive Strategy/Positioning for Advantage
Hospitals and health systems face intense competitive pressures in today's environment, where survival means implementing effective business strategies that maximize efficiency and control costs; attract patients, physicians, and other health professionals; and build a strong, trusted reputation in the community. This session explores business strategies for managing profitability and the issues that arise from implementing these strategies. Participants explore templates that can help determine if an organization is capable of sustaining a business strategy, and discuss the causes of business strategy failure.
Service Line Profitability: Estimation and Decision-Making
At most hospitals, margins differ substantially between service lines (e.g., cardiac services, medicine, obstetrics) and between payers (e.g., Medicaid, managed care) within the same service line. Organizations that are able to estimate service line profitability can negotiate effectively with payers, determine the implications of expanding and/or closing service lines, estimate the financial impact of merging with another institution, and determine the value of physicians to the organization. This session uses actual revenue and expense data for an academic medical center to estimate service line profitability by payer, and then uses the model to make key strategic and operating decisions.
Measuring Customer Preferences: What Do Customers Really Want?
Consumer-oriented organizations rely on customer input to develop successful new products and services. This session begins with a discussion of alternative approaches to measuring what customers want, with a focus on "conjoint analysis," a time-tested and versatile technique that incorporates customer preferences into the new product development process. The session explores how conjoint analysis works, how it compares with other techniques, the pros and cons of different types of conjoint analysis methods, the kinds of decisions conjoint analysis can inform, and its limitations. Examples are used to illustrate the use of the technique for product design, pricing, and segmentation applications.
Strategic Decision-Making, Negotiation, and Influence (session presented in two parts)
Too often, rational people are tripped up by irrational decision-making. Extensive research over the last 25 years has demonstrated that even the most careful managers can fall prey to decision traps. Using real-world examples, exercises, and simulations, this class reveals common decision biases and how to avoid them, to create a framework for making rational, effective decisions. Of course, nothing is more frustrating than making a decision and developing a plan, but not having the skill to get it recognized and implemented. That is why the second half of this session focuses on strategies for building power and influence, and ultimately improving negotiated outcomes.
Making it Real-Positioning for Success
In the face of sweeping reform proposals that could permanently alter the health care system, chief executives must grapple with the challenges of today's current climate, while taking steps to manage imminent change. In New York, that means leaders must operate in a highly regulated, politically active environment, be conscious of issues ranging from workforce to shifting reimbursement, and maintain a positive operating margin, all while ensuring their facility delivers the best possible level of service to patients. In this session, Steven Goldstein, President of Strong Memorial and Highland Hospitals, provides his candid assessment of the current health care landscape and discusses the plethora of challenges facing his system. Mr. Goldstein tackles current leadership questions and strategies, and discusses what chief executives need from their management teams to keep the organization on a path to success.
Virtual Session
The Health Care Landscape
In this session, HANYS' President Daniel Sisto analyzes the current challenges and opportunities for leaders in health care. Drawing on his three decades of leadership experience in this ever-changing environment, Mr. Sisto outlines the major trends and forces that are shaping health care, while offering insight into ways that health care leaders are tackling the thorniest issues. Mr. Sisto's presentation offers a context and perspective for the key concepts and issues discussed thus far at The Academy, and those that will be covered in the coming weeks.
Quality and Patient Safety
The advent of quality performance initiatives, extensive public reporting of quality measures, and government and payer initiatives related to the submission of quality data have placed an extraordinary demand on health care leaders to improve processes and change cultures to drive meaningful and sustainable improvement in quality and patient safety. In this session, participants will learn about operational quality improvement and patient safety concepts, the implications of data accuracy, and how benchmarking and using comparative databases can enhance improvement strategies.
Finance and Health Care Economics
This session covers the history of hospital financial policies and discusses how finance and public health policies are intertwined. Faculty explain how hospitals are reimbursed by public and private payers and describe what leaders need to know to successfully navigate within the highly regulated health care payment environment. Among the topics discussed are the Medicare and Medicaid Prospective Payment Systems, how public goods (e.g., charity care) are paid for, and the balance between margin and mission.
Health Care Planning and Marketing
This session explains how reliable census, demographic, and clinical data can be effectively used and presented to provide accurate, competitive analyses and patient trends, and assist in projecting future resource utilization. By understanding health care utilization, target groups, and population patterns and trends, hospital leaders can make sound, evidence-based decisions, shorten the time between decision-making and implementation, and reduce financial risk.
Connecting the Dots: How Quality of Care and Hospital Finances Inter-relate
The Obama Administration has consistently emphasized the need to move to a health care delivery system that pays for quality, not quantity, of care. As such, health care leaders must understand the direct connection between the quality of care delivered in their facilities and the payment they receive for that care. This session reviews quality measures and hospital reporting requirements, discusses the philosophy and history of pay-for-performance initiatives, and looks toward future initiatives including new and proposed public reporting requirements and Medicare value-based purchasing.
Health Care Workforce
Today's successful health care leaders recognize that human assets and capital are critical to sustaining and growing an organization. Therefore, comprehensive workforce planning is essential, including components such as guiding principles and values, recognition, innovative communications and engagement strategies, customer-centered approaches, cross-alignment, and system thinking. Class participants learn to apply these concepts and approaches to their own workplace to help them engage, attract, and retain staff.
Health Information Technology
Rapid advances in technology, accompanied by high expectations for health care providers to deliver safe, quality, and efficient patient care, have created a complex and often confusing health information technology (HIT) environment for health care leaders. Technology-based goals for hospitals often include improved patient care, privacy assurance, improved efficiency, medical error prevention, and enhanced communication among health care professionals, consumers, and organizations. This session offers insight on HIT and provides strategies that leaders need.
Closing Session
Organizational Change and Renewal
Truly effective organizational change must begin with strategic goals and target the cultural dimension of the organization. The barriers to achieving this type of change are multi-faceted, and can include both psychological and structural factors. Successful change is driven by leaders who are able to overcome these barriers by developing a sense of urgency for change, helping others see solutions in ways that align with a compelling and accepted organizational vision, and mastering skills such as communication, negotiation, and coalition building that move their vision forward. This session uses real-world business cases to present a framework for overcoming common barriers to change, and for leading cultural change and renewal.
Using Financial Statements to Assess Performance
Financial statements are the most visible and widely used means of assessing a company's performance. Using a hospital's recent financial statements, students explore how to read an income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. Then, participants use the financial statements to calculate financial and operating ratios, and use those ratios to assess how well the hospital is performing compared to similar hospitals, hypothesize why the hospital is performing better or worse than its peers, and discuss ways to test the various hypotheses.
Service Excellence
Six Sigma is a fact-based, data-driven quality improvement philosophy that has been highly effective across many industries. Lean Production is a production system whose main objective is to eliminate waste by concurrently reducing or minimizing supplier, customer, and internal variability. Lean Production concepts are widely used in manufacturing and service sector organizations for process improvement. This course explores the Lean Six Sigma approach (a combination of Six Sigma and Lean Production) within the context of process and service excellence in health care.
Strategic Decision-Making
This session will make health care leaders better decision makers by teaching decision concepts and skills and by providing a framework for a good decision process. Using a combination of activities, cases, and exercises, faculty will stress the role of framing decisions in useful ways, seeing how others may view the same decision, identifying shortcomings in intuitive judgment, and learning from experience.
Capstone Project
Throughout The Academy, each participant applies learning toward completing a self-directed "capstone" project that addresses an organization-specific issue. This comprehensive approach provides a valuable return on investment by applying solutions developed in the classroom to a "real-time" challenge by completing a project that can be applied to the workplace.
Leadership Roundtable
As part of the closing session at Cornell, participants hear from hospital chief executive officers about the strategies they employ to address the pressing issues they face. At this roundtable discussion, today's health care leaders explain how they sustain their organizations' mission amid tremendous internal and external obstacles that can appear to be insurmountable.
