Are your incentives aligned with your ambulatory strategy?

Fully embracing an ambulatory strategy often involves changes throughout every level of your organization, and that can be hard. This is especially true when it comes to the impact it may have on current and future incentives within your leadership teams. As you consider how to execute your strategy, take the opportunity to evaluate current incentive programs and how shifts in volume, location, or service models could impact them. Successful incentives drive teams toward the overall objective and should reflect the desired outcome. Whether it's market growth, physician alignment, or selective case migration, ensure the desired outcome becomes the north star for developing incentives across the organization.?

Aligned incentives drive successes that benefit the entire organization, rather than individual markets or facilities. Determine what the long-term big win looks like after the ambulatory strategy is fully executed and work backwards to create incentives that help drive your leaders to success rather than stimy their efforts. Only then, can you lean into the change ahead and have your teams focused on doing things that may seem new, different, or even counter to their prior experience. Give leaders the reason to change and the support to drive the outcomes. But hey – if it were easy, everyone would have done it already, right? So, where do you begin? It all starts with understanding the structure and scale of incentives and how each leader in your organization can play a part.

While incentive programs have similar themes, creating effective ambulatory programs often means incentivizing process change, especially in the beginning. When developing incentive programs that support process change, avoid focusing on just one or two outcome metrics like volume or revenue. Sometimes that means focusing certain segments or leaders on different pieces of the puzzle, with specific process and learning metrics, in addition to the typical revenue and operational benchmarks. ?

Take time to meet stakeholders and determine what types of support will help drive the desired change, aiming to work that into your incentive plan. Remember: successful ambulatory programs rely on highly coordinated efforts between physicians, nurses, clinics, revenue cycle, payor contracting, and even information services. Incentive structures should take that complexity into account, as well. An ideal incentive plan rewards both the process to achieve the desired outcome as well as the outcome itself, so set yourself up for success by rewarding the coordination of effort as well as the desired results. ?

In the end, create individual and group dynamics that support the long-term outcome by rewarding the short-term efforts and process changes necessary to truly drive your next ambulatory program. You will be happy you did!

Join us next week for part 5 of our hospital ambulatory strategy series focused on evaluating and the impact payor contracting plays on your ambulatory strategy.