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Report from The Health Management Academy Physician Executive Forum Spring 2006 Meeting

Executive Summary

Dates:
April 19-23, 2006

Location:
The Montage Resort and Spa (Laguna Beach, CA)

What is the Health Management Academy (HMA)?

• Founded in 1998 by Gerald Bisbee, Jr. PhD (Chairman and CEO); Sherrie Jones (President)
• The Academy’s mission is to establish forums where leading healthcare executives, from provider, supplier, and payer communities, meet regularly to actively engage in a dialogue that is uniquely open, informative, and incisive.
• This invitation-only members forum represents America’s leading health systems and companies who put innovation at the core of their businesses to create sustainable growth and value in today’s market, and to streamline and improve the quality and safety of healthcare.
• This group shares knowledge and explores how visionaries and innovators are using imagination to increase patient safety and improve quality and health outcomes.

Highlights From the 2006 HMA Physician Executive Forum Sessions
Patient Safety at the Nation’s Largest Health Systems: An Executive View (Cardinal Health): This session delivered the results of The Academy Patient Safety Survey, which found that patient safety was the top priority for the health system leaders surveyed. Governance, executive leadership, corporate structure, and technology were all cited as important components to create a patient safety culture that would drive positive patient outcomes and financial results.

By the Numbers: Emerging Trends in Hospital Services (Solucient): This session detailed the following overarching conclusions about the future of the inpatient hospital market; based on research conducted by Solucient:

• Hospital margins are low and are being squeezed by labor costs
• Hospitals are losing market share to outpatient and other facilities
• Mortality has decreased below expected rates, suggesting we are doing a better job with sicker patients
• Inpatient care is being concentrated in the hands of fewer and more specialized physicians
• Hospitalist practices are growing (the 100 top hospitals are twice as likely to have high hospitalist ratios than low ratios)
• Leading hospitals are more likely to add CNO’s and planning/foundation executives, promote leadership from within the organization, and review clinical outcomes and market share information
• Today’s healthcare consumer is more price and value sensitive and will change hospitals for poor ratings (consumers are beginning to watch outcomes, but their approximation of high quality care is still having a “good physician”)

Going Digital: Banner Health’s Fully Digital Estrella Hospital (Banner Health): Banner Health talked about their improvement “architecture.” One of their primary goals has been to leverage technology to assist with care transformation that combines elements from evidence-based best practices, culture, and rapid cycle work design. One of the major challenges to this goal is the huge time and effort involved in the management of all of these documents and resources. They are also acutely aware of the difficulties in driving a high level of standardization as they move from a paper-based to an electronic environment. Their “Hospital for the Future” design components include the following:

• Flexible and adaptable healing environment
• Electronic medical record, computerized physician order entry, and telemedicine
• Operational quality, efficiency, and safety
• Service excellence culture and accountability
• Convenient physical access: walkway connected ambulatory campus, medical office building, and outpatient surgery center

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century (Citigroup Global Markets): This session took a look at Tom Friedman’s book The World is Flat and determined how it applies to the healthcare industry. It discussed the “10 Flatteners” and how the “3 Convergences” would change healthcare delivery. The Ten Flatteners are: 1) 1989 Berlin Wall falls ushering in a new era of globalization, 2) 1995 Netscape goes public triggering .com boom, 3) Workflow empowerment from “virtually” connecting and collaborating, 4) Outsourcing, 5) Offshoring, 6) Open-sourcing, 7) Insourcing, 8) Supply-chaining, 9) Informing through search engines and other aggregating technologies, 10) “Steroids” technologies like wireless access.

The three convergences are: 1) The flatteners work together to generate higher levels of productivity, 2) People are learning new forms of horizontal collaboration through “connectivity” as they adapt themselves and their environment to new economic models, 3) 3+ billion potential participants have been added to the global economy.

There are many parallels here to the healthcare industry and this session involved small breakout sessions and groups to discuss how these technologies and tools might affect their own institutions and the future of medicine.