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Hospitals are getting squeezed from all sides, so winning will come down to nailing the basics—tight operations and finances, great quality, a workable payer mix, steadily better clinical talent, and a patient experience that’s easy and welcoming—with strong board and leadership teamwork to pull it all off.

Amid shifting perceptions of healthcare expertise, board and C-suite leaders must define the basic principles of their organization and its role in medicine, patient care and public health and consider how they will make decisions when these principles might conflict with current perceptions.

A quarterback who has been on more teams than any other NFL player and has spent more time on the bench than on the field may be an unlikely source for leadership lessons. But his observations on his career have as much relevance for CEOs as they have for someone trying to establish their place on a team.

With its acquisition of AMSURG, a national ambulatory chain, Ascension is changing the playbook for not-for-profit business model transformation. The acquisition raises important questions: How do we expect the game to be played moving forward, and how do we want to participate?

large and complex assemblage of interdependencies. Any change to one part could create multiple, hard-to-predict effects throughout the system. When making changes to a fragile system that serves so many, the watchword should be caution.

Why are hospitals unable to efficiently fill their appointment slots, even in the face of very significant demand? Lessons from the airlines on how they fill seats can help provide solutions to this problem.

In conversations with hospital boards and C-suite leaders, a question frequently raised is: “Given such difficult operating circumstances, why are some hospitals successfully managing through – and others are not?”

More management time must be focused on creating a world-class appointment system at all levels of the delivery system. Moving management of your overall appointment process up your priority list will pay material dividends.

A deeper dive into Kaufman Hall’s National Hospital Flash Report data provides important lessons in the management of departmental performance and shared services costs.

The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson drew a chilling response from much of the American public. While wholly inappropriate, this reaction suggests that America’s healthcare consumers might want something very different from what they currently receive.

Healthcare organizations have faced a set of historically intractable problems, some of which have become far more apparent and intense in the 20 months since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, including dealing with the fallout of a public health system.

In my conversations with senior executives at healthcare organizations around the country, I find that leaders have three critical topics on their minds: workforce, workforce, and...