The role of the CEO in hospital management is ever changing. In recent years, the position has become increasingly difficult to be in. Today’s hospital CEO must be a skilled multitasker and be available to many different departments, as well as the community at large. Many hospitals are a part of a larger conglomerate, and CEOs must make decisions about what is best for their facility while working within the confines of the medical group. The mark of a true leader has become envisioning where you want your organization to go in the future and getting it there successfully.
According to Sherry Migliore, today’s CEO has a more challenging job that is oriented more towards merging hospitals. Migliore is director of consulting, eastern region, of PENSCO, a healthcare consulting company owned by the Pennsylvania Medical Society in Harrisburg, Pa. Today’s CEOs have to work with a wide range of people, and especially be community and physician oriented. Often, there is tension between management and physicians, so PENSCO has a medical director who can teach CEOs the skills needed to help hospital staff work as a group. They also outsource medical directors to HMOs on a temporary basis.
Migliore has found that the better CEOs have prior work experience in a hospital and have a knowledge of the workforce and the hospital internal structure and can use that information to make better decisions, especially with the increase of smaller hospitals being taken over by for-profit conglomerates.
“The marketplace is continuing to change pretty significantly, and [CEOs] need to have the skills to be on top of that process and understand what’s occurring in the marketplace, and understand where their organization fits and where it needs to go,” says Migliore.
Please refer to the October 2001 issue for the complete story. For information on article reprints, contact Martin St. Denis
