The Backstory

The severity of the coronavirus outbreak continues to grow globally. And with it, the buzz and media attention and fear. At the same time, it’s not yet a big issue here in the US. Hospitals here generally aren’t on the front lines of combatting the outbreak. In this conversation, our CEO David Jarrard speaks to senior managing advisor Aileen Bennett about the situation and that gap between the attention that’s being paid to coronavirus with what’s happening inside the wall of US hospitals.

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The business relationship between physicians and hospitals is shifting.

It's thanks to new compensations models and new models for patient care, largely (but not exclusively) driven by the move towards value-based care. James Cervantes, associate vice president in the National Practice here at Jarrard Inc., brings a wealth of experience working on leadership structure, professional development and physician group management for hospitals and health systems. And, he's been watching the evolution of the physician-hospital relationship closely.

Here, he talks about some of the changes happening in physician employment models, including compensation and care delivery, and how administration can best work and communicate with physicians during this evolution of the care team.

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On this J|Insights our CEO, David Jarrard, talks about a really interesting article titled Beyond burnout: Docks Decry ‘Moral Injury’ from Financial Pressures of Healthcare. It's by Melissa Bailey over at Kaiser Health News and was published on February 4.

The idea of moral injury actually started in military and combat situations. It's this idea that it's not just stress and it's not just frustration with things being a certain way, but it's actually being in a position where you feel forced do something or not do something that, as a result of that action or inaction, leads to harm for someone. And we're seeing that as part of the massive burnout problem among physicians today.

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Some hospitals look like disaster zones during this year’s historically serious flu season.

And now the US is bracing for the potential threat of coronavirus, generating significant fear (and, it seems, somewhat masking the news about the flu).

Behind the scenes and away from the media buzz, many providers are taking drastic measures to handle increased patient loads and prevent the flu virus from spreading within their clinics and hospitals. And they are creating plans to prepare for and respond to a coronavirus outbreak. Visitor restrictions, security checks at entrances, all-caps warning signs, mandates to wear protective masks and even tents or makeshift intake areas are common.

While these precautions are essential, we believe you can still deliver a great experience, even in the midst one of the worst flu seasons in decades. Here are nine ideas you can implement today that will help prevent the flu from spreading, keep employees motivated, mitigate fear and build trust among patients and members of your community. In addition, these communications tips can be adapted if and when your organization faces other frightening and highly communicable diseases such as coronavirus.

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The general outlook for healthcare remains positive…despite the election.

That was the core message presented from the stage at the 2020 Council Panel: Wall Street’s View on Prospects for the Health Care Industry, put on by the Nashville Health Care Council. Sitting on that stage were three healthcare finance wonks, plus a popular leader in the healthcare industry who took on the role of emcee. Milton Johnson, retired chairman and CEO of HCA Healthcare moderated the discussion

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Healthcare marketers have the tools they need. We’re neck deep in tools. 2020 is not the year of more tools.

Instead, it’s the year of finally using tools the right way and connecting them to the bigger goal – not just taking them out for a spin and running test campaigns divorced from what our organizations are trying to accomplish.

We see five areas where digital healthcare marketing needs to look at this year. As the year goes on, we’ll dig in and focus on specific tactics and best practices for each.

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Founding partner and chief development officer Anne Hancock Toomey spent most of last week in San Francisco at the annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. And, like most of the 50,000 healthcare executives in town, she never set foot in the Westin for the actual conference. Instead, she spent 16-hour days traversing the hills of San Francisco to meet with those who are otherwise busy delivering superior healthcare, disrupting an antiquated model or financing and advising those in either of the former groups. It was exhilarating (and, yes, exhausting) to break bread with some of the brightest minds in healthcare.

In nearly every conversation, she asked healthcare executives the same question:

In 2020, what’s one offensive move health systems and providers should make and what’s one defensive move they must make given the headwinds and call for transformation in the industry?

Their feedback grouped nicely into a handful of themes: taking cost out of the system, focusing on the consumer experience, forging smart partnerships upstream and down and scale, scale, scale.

Here, Hancock Toomey and CEO David Jarrard discuss what she heard.

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Our CEO, David Jarrard, reviews the first season of Art of Change and explains what he's learned from our conversations with healthcare leaders over the past year.

We created the Art of Change because we felt the phrase itself captured the heart of our firm. Change done well is an art. And we began a voyage through stories and videos and illustrations to capture that art, asking, “What does it look like?” and, “What kind of stories could we create to try to capture that lightning in a bottle?

One of the things I'm most delighted about in the series is how many leaders we've been able to talk to around the country who have demonstrated their great skill at the art of change. And they all do it differently. They all bring unique experiences and unique culture and understanding of their people and their environment to make the art of change happen in a way that works for them. So, one of my favorite learnings out of this series is that there is an art to change –There are some fundamental principles that make it successful. But in execution it can be as different as an oil painting to a statue.

There are parts of the Art of Change that could have been written a hundred years ago because people are people, and change is change and people are going to be resistant to it. The fundamental principles are the same. But what we've developed over the last year is catching the art in the moment. It's like a piece of amber: This is the art today. If we wrote it five years ago, the principles would be the same but the environment different, and the nuances would change.

So, for a leader today, it's less about understanding exactly what ROI or business considerations changed or what structure was followed then versus now. Instead, it’s an appreciation of the principles and how they apply to who the leader is. Not just for the year that they are about to embark upon but for today: “If there are ten rules to the art of change, what are the three that apply as I walk the halls this afternoon?”

That's a great touchstone for anybody and how we hope you will use these principles.

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In the previous conversation with our CEO David Jarrard, we talked about what's going on with the increasing scrutiny being placed on hospitals and health systems by the media, the public and politicians. We also talked about what healthcare leaders can do to prepare their organizations. Here, Jarrard discusses what those same leaders can do personally to prepare and perhaps even change the way they approach their job in order to lead their organizations through an uncertain year.

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It's become apparent over the past few months that the perception of hospitals and healthcare providers as a whole has changed. Even in the last couple of weeks, numerous stories have appeared in the media placing healthcare providers under new levels of scrutiny - and appropriately so. On top of that, it's a presidential election year, adding an additional layer of pressure. Our CEO, David Jarrard, thinks that this trend will only increase in 2020. What is going on and how should healthcare leaders respond? Glad you asked...

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