Resource Library

Fulfilling duties includes actively engaging in practices that promote good governance. A review of best practices enables the board to reflect on opportunities for improvement.

The legal authority to approve, limit or deny provider credentials and privileges is a fundamental board responsibility. Organizations that centralize and standardize this process are better prepared to meet the field’s many changes and challenges.

What is the board’s role in shaping culture? Several health care leaders offer advice that reflects the diversity of their experiences.

Oversight of an employed physician network is a new and evolving role for your board. Focus on five key issues, and adopt three best practices, to help the network succeed.

An external review of workplace operations produces a Leadership Letter with observations and recommendations for continuous improvement, followed by open discussion among the board, CEO and top management.

To understand how the organization really functions on a day-to-day basis, boards need to gauge the hospital’s work life and its efficacy. Board responsibilities include: (a) understanding the hospital’s operating model and whether it actually performs in that mode, how critical decisions are made, and the hospital’s ability to recognize its own problems and “self-correct”; and (b) ensuring that it happens.

By tracking outcomes, the committee can ensure that the program operates consistently with the established philosophy and that areas requiring attention are readily identified. When combined with comprehensive tally sheets and affirmation that all executive compensation arrangements are fully disclosed to the committee, there is a comprehensive baseline underlying the committee’s deliberations.

As health care organizations face a number of emerging challenges, the compensation committee of the not-for- profit hospital and health system board is well served to review and update the executive compensation program periodically.

Discover the benefits of shared performance goals at the system level and how to implement them in your executive compensation program with AHA's tips.

Philanthropy can drive innovative initiatives to address social, economic, educational and quality of life issues in the community.

The seismic forces currently roiling health care present boards with a new set of profoundly consequential strategic options. These often involve significant risk, major mission shifts, and challengingly short windows of opportunity.

A good coach focuses on what the board chair wants to accomplish and designs a coaching process based on how the board chair experiences the role; on assessment of individual strengths and weaknesses; and on identifying and addressing blind spots. Each coaching process should be customized to meet the board chair’s individual needs and goals.

Making coaching available to an incoming board chair can build the chair's capacity to lead the board effectively.

Consumerism, personalized medicine, digital technology and artificial intelligence are fundamentally changing the way health care is purchased, delivered and organized.

With proper planning and investment, hospitals and health systems can reduce cyber risks and vulnerabilities.

The crisis brewing in the traditional governance model requires conscious construction of new models relevant to new times.

This webinar makes the case that the time has come to develop a new model of hospital and health system governance. Presenter Jamie Orlikoff discusses four phases in the evolution of the current model of governance and ongoing market and organizational pressures that make it difficult for the current model to withstand, and he suggests that these pressures are likely to deepen as their pace, scope and scale accelerate.

Value creation occurs at many levels in organizations. This chart, used by St. Charles Health System based in Bend, Ore., describes the unique role of governance as well the roles of leadership, management and front-line workers in applying Lean principles to support sustained organizational improvement.

Standard Work for Governance Example Source: St. Charles Health System. Used with Permission. Lean principles and practices drive performance improvement by clarifying the steps involved in work processes to avoid wasting time reinventing how work should be done. The board of St. Charles Health System in Bend, Ore., developed “standard work” for several board processes to improve governance performance. An example of standard work for biannual distribution of director stipends appears here.

Health care is ripe for change. The evidence is all around us. A majority of health care leaders recently surveyed said hospitals and health systems are most in need of disruptive innovation (New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst, February 16, 2017). Consumers are taking charge of their own health and seeking providers that deliver high-quality, affordable and accessible care in ways they have come to expect from their favorite retailers. And disrupters from within and outside of health care are joining forces and competing with traditional health care organizations to give consumers what they are looking for.