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 will focus 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 a positive action plan focused on each participant's strengths that is linked to personal and career objectives, as well as a method for implementing the plan.
Competitive Landscape: Industry Analysis
To formulate a competitive strategy, a manager needs to understand the industry landscape. That is, who are important players that affect the firm's profitability? In today's health care environment, managers must formulate competitive strategies that play well to their organizations' own strengths. Critically, managers must understand that competitive strategy defines what a firm does and what a firm cannot do. This module will explore frameworks to analyze the competitive structure of health care and competitive strategy tradeoffs.
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, participants will learn how to assess performance using the income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flow. Participants will then use the financial statements as a basis to develop key performance metrics to: 1) assess how well the hospital is performing compared to similar hospitals; 2) hypothesize why the hospital is performing better or worse than its peers; and 3) discuss ways to test the various hypotheses.
Service Excellence
Six Sigma is a fact-based, data-driven philosophy of quality improvement that has been found to be highly effective for process improvement in a large number of companies across many industries. Lean Production is "a socio-technical production system whose main objective is to eliminate waste by concurrently reducing or minimizing supplier, customer, and internal variability." While originally developed by Toyota for automobile manufacturing, the concepts and tools of Lean Production are now widely used in both manufacturing and service sector organizations for process improvement. During this course, participants will get a background of the Lean Six Sigma approach (combination of Six Sigma and Lean Production) within the context of process and service excellence in health care.
Measuring Customer Preferences: What Do Customers Really Want?
Consumer-oriented organizations rely on customer input to develop successful new products and services. This session will begin with a discussion of alternative approaches to measure customer preferences, with a focus on "conjoint analysis," a time-tested and versatile technique to incorporate customer preferences into new product development. The session will explore 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 will illustrate the use of the technique for product design, pricing, and segmentation applications.
Competitive Strategy/Positioning for Advantage
Hospitals and health systems are non-profit in New York, but that does not mean there is a lack of competition. Providers face intense competitive pressures in today's environment, where survival means implementing effective business strategies that maximize efficiency and cost-control; attract patients, physicians, and other health professionals; and build a strong, trusted reputation in the community. This session will explore business strategies for managing profitability, and the trade-offs that come with adopting these business strategies. Participants will learn about templates managers should use to understand if an organization is capable of sustaining a business strategy, and discuss the causes of business strategy failure.
Making it Real-Positioning for Success
As a transition from the leadership and management session at Cornell University to the health care-focused Web sessions, a prominent hospital chief executive officer will talk about the application of leadership principles to health care. The challenges of the current health care environment, strategies for the future, and the imperative for effective, engaged leaders will be addressed.
Virtual Session
The Health Care Landscape
In this session, HANYS' President Daniel Sisto will provide an overview of the current challenges and opportunities for leaders in health care today. Drawing on his three decades of leadership experience in this ever-changing environment, Mr. Sisto will discuss 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 will offer 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.
Health Care Planning and Marketing
This session will explain 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.
Finance and Health Care Economics
This session will cover the history of hospital financial policies and discuss how finance and public health policies are intertwined. Faculty will provide an overview of 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 will be the Medicare and Medicaid Prospective Payment Systems, how public goods (e.g., charity care) are paid for, and margin vs. mission.
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, implications of data accuracy, and how benchmarking and using comparative databases can contribute to improvement strategies.
Connecting the Dots: How Quality of Care and Hospital Finances Inter-relate
"Better care should be rewarded . . . it is time that we pay for the quality of the health care provided to our beneficiaries, not simply the amount." These comments from Mark McClellan, past Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, reflect the current and future impetus for health care leaders to make the direct connection between the quality of care delivered in their facilities and the payment they receive for that care. This session will review quality measures and hospital reporting requirements, discuss the philosophy and history of pay-for-performance initiatives, and look toward future initiatives including new and proposed public reporting requirements and Medicare value-based purchasing.
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, assuring privacy, improved efficiencies, medical error prevention, and enhanced communication among health care professionals, consumers, and organizations. This session will offer perspective on HIT, providing strategies that leaders need.
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 and includes components such as guiding principles and values, recognition, innovative communications and engagement strategies, customer-centered approaches, cross-alignment, and system thinking. Participants will be able to apply these concepts and approaches to their own workplace to help them engage, attract, and retain staff.
Closing Session
Organizational Change and Renewal
Truly effective organizational change must be targeted at the strategic as well as the cultural level of the organization. The barriers to achieving this type of change are multi-faceted, and can include both psychological and structural factors. Successful change efforts are 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 organizational vision, and mastering skills such as communication, negotiation, and coalition building that move their vision forward. This session will use real-world business cases to present a framework for overcoming common barriers to change, and for putting the steps into place for leading cultural change and renewal.
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 will use actual revenue and expense data for an academic medical center to estimate service line profitability by payer, and then use the model to make key strategic and operating decisions.
Strategic Negotiation
This session focuses on improving negotiating skills and developing techniques for building agreement among organizational stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, partners, and employees. It examines how to build positive working relationships and ways to move from confrontation to problem-solving. Briefings, case studies, and simulations demonstrate approaches to preparing for negotiations, how to handle difficult negotiations, and ways to invent creative options that address the interests of all parties.
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
Over the duration of The Academy, each participant will apply learning toward completing a self-directed "capstone" project that addresses an organization-specific issue. This comprehensive approach provides a valuable return on investment by implementing solutions to a "real-time" challenge or project that can be applied to the workplace.
Leadership Roundtable
As part of the closing session at Cornell, participants will hear from hospital chief executive officers. This discussion will provide participants an opportunity to hear the pressing issues facing some of the most successful health care executives and the strategies they employ. Hear from today's health care leaders how they sustain their organizations' mission amidst tremendous internal and external obstacles that can appear to be insurmountable.
