The Role of CEOs in Ensuring Quality and Compassionate Care in the Medical Field

Healthcare professionals work long hours in demanding environments ranging from routine tasks to life-or-death procedures. Their work requires leadership infused with integrity and vision. Research has shown that highly engaged hospital employees positively influence patient experience and quality outcomes.

Reputation

Any top-level managerial job is challenging, but CEOs in the healthcare industry face unique challenges that require their management skills to be even more honed. Providing safe, high-quality patient care has always been a priority for hospital CEO. Healthcare is a highly regulated industry, and CEOs must be mindful of the regulatory environment and the need to provide the best possible service. The organization’s reputation is also a concern for CEOs in the healthcare industry, as one negative event could have a greater impact than it would in another type of business.

Moreover, physicians, nurses, and patients often have different judgments about what constitutes quality in medical care.

Leadership

In addition to the usual managerial and leadership skills, hospital CEOs must be able to adapt to changing healthcare environments. This can mean embracing new care models, technologies, and management strategies that may require reorganizing the organization. The most successful hospital CEOs, like Sam Lee Prospect Medical, have a strong sense of mission and the capacity to motivate their teams. They are also open to learning about best practices in other industries and incorporating them into their healthcare facilities.

As the healthcare industry continues to undergo sweeping changes, it will take a different type of healthcare leader to ensure operational excellence. These leaders will understand the continuum of care and be capable of bundling services to provide patients with quality service at affordable costs. This will require aligned leadership by the board and the CEO based on an executable strategy cascaded throughout the organization. Those hospitals with matched CEO and leadership team responses had higher patient experience scores.

Employee Engagement

Achieving employee engagement in the workplace is a crucial task for hospital CEOs. Engaged employees tend to be less absent and more productive. A high degree of employee engagement also directly impacts the bottom line through reduced wage costs and overtime expenses. It helps those who must cover their absence, as well as recruiting and replacement expenses. When employees are engaged, they care about their organization and feel a strong connection to it. This is evident in how they use discretionary effort to uphold core tenets of their job – listening intently to patients without feeling rushed, always sanitizing their hands, or making few mistakes while administering medication.

Until recently, little research has explored the effect of employee engagement on overall hospital performance. A quantitative online survey was administered to 60 acute care hospital CEOs and leadership teams. It was about their perceptions of collective organizational meetings (COE). This study found that higher COE correlates with hospitals’ HCAHPS patient experience scores. It explains a large portion of the variance in these measures.

Patient Experience

Several studies have shown that the patient experience is important in determining the quality of patient care. This has led to a focus on the patient experience in healthcare organizations, with some arguing that people should consider patient experience a pillar of quality, clinical effectiveness, and safety. The patient experience encompasses their entire journey through the healthcare system, from before they seek treatment to long after discharge from a hospital or clinic. This includes their interactions with doctors, nurses, and support staff at each point. Hospital CEOs must understand the healthcare industry’s unique structure and complexities and have high-level managerial skills to succeed. Nursing professionals pursuing an advanced degree can prepare themselves for this challenging yet rewarding career.