Advice for tomorrow’s health care CEOs, the $4.6 billion price of physician burnout, and more top health care news

When Ron Williams joined Aetna in 2001, the health insurer was losing $1 million a day. By the time he left in 2011, as chairman and CEO, Aetna was making $2 billion a year in revenue.

When I sat down with Williams, who is now CEO of RW2 Enterprises and the author of a new book, “Learning to Lead: The Journey to Leading Yourself, Leading Others, and Leading an Organization,” I wanted to know two things: how did he do that? And would that playbook stand up for today’s health care leaders at a time when the industry is undergoing dramatic change?

• For Aetna at that time, Williams believes it was the combination of his operations experience and the clinical know-how of Dr. Jack Rowe, then CEO, that put the company on the right path. “Jack changed fundamentally our relationships with physicians and the health care community,” Williams told me. “I developed new products, new capabilities, that fundamentally improved customer service, our strategy.”
• The industry is changing, however. “It's much more collaborative,” he said. “There are many more stakeholders whose voices you have to listen to, including patients, patient advocate groups.”

You can read an excerpt from Williams’ book as part of LinkedIn's #WeekendEssay section here. You can also check out the full, edited transcript of the interview.

What’s your take? What do you think tomorrow’s health care leaders need to learn today?

News I’m Watching

1. Physician burnout is costlier than you think. A new study found physician turnover and reductions in clinical hours as a result of burnout costs an estimated $4.6 billion a year in the U.S. “An unwell and unhappy workforce may result in high turnover and replacement, low-quality care, a high risk for medical errors and malpractice claims, and suboptimal patient outcomes,” Dr. Edward Ellison, executive medical director for the Southern California Permanente Medical Group, wrote in an accompanying editorial.

“What are we going to do about this? Leveraging simpler EHRs, policies, and protocols can be a good start. But what about using teams? Team-based care, including integrated primary and behavioral health care, can help providers see that they are not an island.” - Andrew Philip, Primary Care Development Corp.

2. Ohio nurse strike carries on. Nurses in Ohio have been striking for three weeks over staffing concerns, according to the Associated Press. They say that they have to be on-call on a regular basis and are sometimes forced to work overtime because of staffing shortages. Nurses in different states have threatened to strike over similar concerns this year. In April, New York City nurses demanded minimum staffing levels. (They won.)

“Nurses, already in short supply, have authorized a lot of hospital strikes over the past couple years. Pay and health benefits are part of the issue, but understaffing is the driving force.” - Bob Herman, Axios

3. AstraZeneca flips the model on drug development. Instead, the drugmaker plans to prioritize cancer therapies that target the disease in the early stage when it comes to making new medicines, according to The Wall Street Journal. This is a departure from the traditional pharma development cycle, which tends to pursue patients with advanced forms of cancer. Oncology has become the research-and-development go-to for pharma in recent years, with breakthrough FDA approvals from companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck and Pfizer.

What’s your take on this week’s stories? What do tomorrow’s health care leaders need to learn today? How should hospital executives address physician burnout? Will an early-stage focus differentiate AstraZeneca in the crowded oncology market? Will we see more nurse strikes in 2019? Share your thoughts in the comments, using #TheCheckup.