Thoughts from Ken Kaufman

When it comes to equity, healthcare organizations face three different and very difficult challenges: health disparities among patient populations, income inequality in the healthcare...

In February, U.S. inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index grew 7.9% year-over-year, the highest increase in four decades. The factors influencing the current inflationary...

The long-term attributes of this year’s Final Four are certainly the attributes of success in college basketball. They are also the attributes of success for businesses in a scaled economy. Whatever sort of enterprise you participate in, these observations form your own playbook for success in our current business environment.

March is National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month. I didn’t need a calendar reminder to start me thinking about this disease. At this moment, I am recovering from ostomy surgery, the...

Kaufman Hall co-founder and Chair Ken Kaufman and Senior Vice President Lisa Goldstein—formerly a longtime not-for-profit hospital ratings analyst for Moody’s—recently explored the evolving perspectives of healthcare leaders on how to best balance credit ratings with other key strategic imperatives, including the rising importance of health equity

One of the COVID pandemic’s most bitter lessons has been the complete inadequacy and dysfunction of the U.S. public health system, if the word “system” can even be applied.

Artificial intelligence is a new idea that even data experts don’t fully understand. It requires a new view of the role of healthcare in improving health and preventing disease.

With the COVID crisis entering its third year and continuing to demand the immediate attention of hospitals, executives should look closely at Amazon’s example of investing across their businesses to satisfy long-term customer needs.

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...

The well-worn phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” has new relevance in American business these days. Take the case of State Farm insurance. For almost ten years, Green Bay...

Today, American culture is changing so quickly and with such a high degree of nuance that it is increasingly difficult both to interpret and to navigate. However, navigating how those...

The stubbornly persistent effects of the COVID pandemic remind us that the organizational goal in 2021 and beyond is NOT to find the way back to a pre-COVID comfort zone, but rather to negotiate and navigate toward being the best performing healthcare organization possible within a fast-changing and uncertain post-COVID business environment.

America is changing in too many ways to count. The political and cultural ramifications of an increasingly pluralistic population are harder and harder to predict and make overall governance of complex healthcare organizations an increasing challenge.

The healthcare gyroscope is a delicate combination of management, governance, and medical attitudes and processes that keeps all complex healthcare organizations functioning in a way that serves the best interests of its patients and associated communities.

On this episode, Ken Kaufman, Chair of Kaufman Hall, and Michael Peregrine, Partner at McDermott, discuss the board’s top post-pandemic governance and leadership challenges.

A very interesting short article recently appeared in The New York Times that explored the COVID phenomenon of “languishing.” The author defines languishing as “the collective fog we...

For a very long time, hospitals have been organized around three principles that inform the way they run their organizations, and how they conduct themselves in the management suite and the board room.

On this episode Michael Peregrine and Ken Kaufman discuss a number of important post-pandemic developments for the board to consider.

For many hospitals and health systems around the country, COVID-19 threatens to create long-term negative changes to volumes, revenues, and margins on top of the pressures that weighed on hospitals even before the pandemic.

In the roughly 12 months since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, America’s hospitals have borne a huge amount of the pressure and accountability for managing the effects of an unknown and unpredictable virus, and more recently for the complex process of disseminating vaccines.

A Special Edition Governing Health Series This episode - the first in our new Governing Health special edition series - features Ken Kaufman, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Kaufman...

Never before have organizations been required to think more rapidly and radically than in the volatile environment of COVID-19, when existing business models are being decimated daily, and organizations need to hit a new target that is hazy at best.

For all organizations, the imperative is to ensure that women and people of color are placed in the most senior leadership positions—not just part of the broader leadership team, but in positions that will place them in the most exclusive groups making the most important decisions.

We can expect that as new entrants continue to encroach on the healthcare space, they will apply the principles of the Product Age and the subscription business model.

The Shopify platform means that virtually anyone can be a retail entrepreneur. And a Shopify-style option for hospitals may mean that almost any hospital can offer some level of telehealth services.

Healthcare organizations have rotated toward a transactional operating platform because that platform is highly correlated to efficient operations, consistent levels of clinical care, and excellent financial performance.

After several years of research and development, the automated teller machine made its first appearance in 1967 at a branch of London’s Barclay’s Bank. Two years later, the first U.S. ATM was installed at a branch of the Chemical Bank on Long Island.

Many of us have questions surrounding possible consolidation of the provider space post-COVID. Read the Thoughts from Ken for details about what we could expect.