Healthcare Executive - November/December 2013 - 43

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Chief Executive Officer
A publication of the American College of Healthcare Executives CEO Circle

 
Patient Satisfaction: Meeting the Needs
of Our Customers

your career

John M. Buell

While patient satisfaction has typically been ranked amoung the top concerns of CEOs, financial challenges consistently is the No. 1 issue confronting hospitals, according to ACHE research.
But if you take a deeper dive into the numbers (see “Top Issues Confronting
Hospitals: 2012” on page 2), you will find three specific financial concerns facing hospitals that all are connected in some way to patient satisfaction: Medicaid
reimbursement, government funding cuts and Medicare reimbursement.
Even though CEOs ranked patient satisfaction a 5.6 out of 10, with the
lowest numbers indicating the highest concern, 83 percent and 72 percent
respectively said Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement were among their
specific financial challenges. You may recall that beginning this past Oct.
1 new payment rates took effect. This specifically included HCAHPS performance in the calculation of the value-based incentive payment in the
Hospital Value-Based Purchasing program.
“Value based purchasing has brought increased focus on understanding
the patient’s perception of the care they receive,” says John M. Haupert,
FACHE, president and CEO of 919-bed Grady Health System, Atlanta. “If
organizations had not previously focused on service excellence, then having
their satisfaction scores publicly reported and incorporated into their Value
Based Purchasing equation should get their attention. At Grady, we recognized the need to focus on improving our patients’ perception of the care
they receive as part of improving our image in the community. We also see
it as part of meeting the expectations of Value Based Purchasing because
our scores had historically been low but, most importantly, because our
patients deserve to have the best possible experience we can provide when
they receive patient care services from us.”
Haupert says it is imperative that the organization’s operational goals,
including those related to service excellence, be cascaded throughout the
organization and incorporated into the annual goal documents of every
executive, director, manager and supervisor in the organization. Hospitals
(continued on page 6)

Building a New
CEO-Board Dynamic

James E. Orlikoff

In the rapidly and radically changing healthcare environment, the
CEO’s relationship with the board
has never been more important,
under more pressure or more challenging. Yet the quality of governance—and of the CEO-board
relationship—that was sufficient
to get your organization where it
is today will be insufficient to get
it where it needs to be tomorrow.
Unprecedented environmental
pressures will magnify previously
irrelevant flaws in the relationship
and have negative consequences for
you and the organization.
Effective CEOs are rethinking and
revising the basic dynamics of their
relationship with their board. Some
changes will be structural, such as
who is on the board and how the
board controls its meetings, and
others will be transactional such as
how the CEO relates to the board.
As CEO you will need to establish
new and clearer boundaries between
governance and management and
allow the board to function more
(continued on page 5)

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Healthcare Executive - November/December 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Healthcare Executive - November/December 2013