Practicing new Leadership Mindsets in our Healthcare Systems

Healthcare is both big business AND Hippocratic-oath* driven. The changes faced by the Healthcare systems and physician associations with whom we work are constant and significant. 

A great new book by an outstanding educator and businessman Jim Austin and 2 colleagues neatly summarises the challenges leaders in our Health Care Systems are facing.

I share the top 4 Healthcare System challenges with you, as my coaching clients are experiencing the same: 

1. 1. Technology and innovations are adopted too slowly: telemedicine and continuum of care requiring speedier adjustments and training
2. 2. Organisational changes towards Patient-centric structures are drastic and transformational: cross-silo collaboration and asset-sharing, overcoming fiefdoms and tradition
3. Cost management as a decision input. As costs are not sustainable, Outcome based compensation per member, per month (from insurers at this point, as most physicians are still FFS compensation – Fee for Service) require leadership to invest in preventative care and partner with community organisations, all of which take time and can be hard to motivate in the short term.
4. Leaders living new organisational behaviours and values: recognition of positive, productive physician behaviour, constructive feedback conversations occurring for the development of clinicians, and inclusion of administrators as peers.

One final point: prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say. Med Schools and hospitals being where our future doctors are being trained, you will be impressed to see “warmth” and EQ in the Hippocratic oath of Johns Hopkins (my family birthplace), updated to incorporate bio-ethics and the above new mindsets:

I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism. I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.

I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.

…I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

 One cannot out-prose Hippocrat so I end here. Above are a few key issues our Healthcare leaders are facing. Next post will be how we are helping them address these changes within each unique context, as well as at an individual leader-level. Please share your examples and experience, as this sector is key to our economy and demographics.