Center for Healthcare Governance Monographs 2005
 NEW! - Does Excellent Health Care Governance Lead to Excellent Performance?
(Or, can a Great Board make a Difference?)
About the Authors:
Doglas D. Hawthorne is president and CEO of Texas Health Resources, the largest nonprofit health care system in the state of Texas.
William L. Harrod, Ph.D. and James P. Schuessler are Principals of Signiture Healthcare Advisors, a Forth Worth and Austin, Texas-based consulting firm dedicated to improving governance in health care organizations.
Preface:
Recent for-profit organizations failures and scandals have given rise to a variety of legislative and regulatory actions to improve management and governance performance and accountability. Many of the new requirements and prescriptions for better public company leadership and governance already are making their way into the not-for-profit arena. As organizations and boards in all sectors work to put into place more rigorous oversight processes and accountabilities, the questions that must be asked is: Does good governance actually link to better organizational performance? Otherwise, why all the effort?
This monograph discusses the results of a study designed to answer that question. The study was conducted by Center for Healthcare Governance member Texas Health Resources (THR) and Signature Healthcare Advisors, a consulting firm focused on governance improvement. The study did not only examine the board’s performance within the context of five proven domains of strong governance developed by Signature. These domains emphasize board processes and decision making and how key board actions and decisions correlate with the organization’s financial and market share performance.
THR’s experience tells a compelling story of how an active and courageous board that makes the right decision at the right times can have a significant, positive impact on the organization’s performance. However, the value of THR’s story goes beyond demonstrating this impact. All governing boards can benefit from examining how their performance relates to that of their organizations. Understanding this relationship can help identify where board action supported positive organizational performance or where the wrong board action at the wrong time may have contributed to less than optimal performance. This knowledge can then become a catalyst for developing specific strategies for more effective board and organizational performance –the outcome desired by every board and the organization it governs.
Click here to return to the Monograph page.
|
