Kevin Fickenscher, MD, Executive Vice President, Perot Systems, Plano, TX

Do Better Boards Have Better Hospitals? Governance Best Practices That Will Improve Your Board and Your Health Care System

Kathryn J. McDonagh, President and CEO, CHRISTUS Spohn Health System, Corpus Christi, TX

Kathy McDonagh has been fascinated with boards and how they function for many years. She will share practical insights from a variety of board experiences and present practices that strengthen board performance. Dr. McDonagh will also present findings from her research on the effectiveness of boards and how boards influence hospital performance. Findings from a national report from the Blue Ribbon Panel on Healthcare Governance will also be discussed.

Building Bench Strength: Developing an Unbeatable Leadership Team That Drives Performance

Kerry A. Garrigan, Vice President for Human Resources, North Carolina Baptist Hospital, Winston-Salem, NC and Loren Appelbaum, Senior Consultant, Development Dimensions International, Bridgeville, PA

This session will explore how to identify tomorrow’s health care leaders and prepare them to lead significant organizational change, citing North Carolina Baptist Hospital as a best practice. This case study presentation will demonstrate how North Carolina Baptist Hospital implemented a strategic talent strategy to mitigate risk and create a stable supply of leaders who will be ready for tomorrow’s business challenges—and how other health care organizations can do the same. Mr. Appelbaum will share the latest talent management research and trends occurring across the country, then provide an overview of the critical steps involved in any world-class talent strategy. Ms.Garrigan will provide the real-life context associated with each of these steps, citing best practices, lessons learned and results. You will learn how to identify the leadership competencies that are most critical to your long-term success, as well as how to select and grow leaders to achieve your organization’s goals.

The Business Case for Building Better Hospitals: Why Boards Must Ask Question #6

Blair Sadler, President Emeritus, Children’s Hospital and Health Center and Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, San Diego, CA

For trustees, deciding what to build and how to finance it is usually the biggest financial decision they will ever have to make. With so much at stake, the time is right for hospital leaders to invest a little more money, not just to build a new hospital, but to design and build a better hospital—one that will actually save the hospital significant dollars in the long run. In this session, you will hear about rigorous research that has linked a hospital’s physical environment to its clinical and satisfaction outcomes for patients and staff. You will gain insights on how incorporating evidence-based design into hospital construction plans can be an important tool in making hospitals safer, more healing, and better places to work, and understand the first steps that boards should take to build a better hospital.

A Conversation on Innovation: Lessons for Boards and Executive Leadership in Thinking Strategically

Oren Harari, PhD, Graduate School of Business, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA and George Lynn, President and CEO, AtlantiCare, Atlantic City, NJ

This highly interactive session will focus on how to create strategies that move from incremental change to quantum shifts which have economic logic and that create competitive advantage. The session will build on Oren's keynote address and provide action steps that will help your hospital break from the pack.

The Board and the Medical Staff: Ensuring Clinical Quality and Transparency

David Speltz, Managing Director, Huron Consulting Group, New York, NY and Jan Radke, MD, Managing Director, Huron Consulting Group, New York, NY

This presentation will focus on the roles the board must fill in evaluating, monitoring, and exercising its duty in assuring that clinicians are providing safe and proper care to patients. It will explore the debates, the sources of friction and examine the various solutions to achieving proper board monitoring with good care.

Creating Quality Literacy: A New Educational Resource for Trustees

John R. Combes, MD, President and COO, Center for Healthcare Governance, Chicago, IL and Osama I. Mikhail, PhD, Professor, Management & Policy Sciences, University of Texas, School of Public Health, Houston, TX

Increasing pressure is being placed on boards to be accountable for organizational quality, patient safety and clinical outcomes. This increased expectation for accountability will require boards and trustees to achieve higher levels of quality literacy. This session will describe a new educational resource developed by the Center for Healthcare Governance and supported by the Massachusetts Hospital Association and Massachusetts Blue Cross Blue Shield. An overview of this modular curriculum will be described and a variety of educational/presentation models will be discussed.

Building Better Board-CEO Relations

James E. Orlikoff, President, Orlikoff & Associates, Inc., and Senior Consultant, Center for Healthcare Governance, Chicago, IL

The relationship of the Board to the CEO is the most crucial relationship to effective governance and leadership. Unfortunately, this relationship is often framed by unspoken expectations and implicit assumptions and is not as productive or stable as it could be. This session will explore common sources of friction in the Board-CEO relationship, and will outline approaches for both Boards and CEOs to assess and improve it.