AHA & AMA Develop Principles for Integrated Hospital-Physician Leadership

The American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association have jointly published principles for success in integrating physician/clinician and hospital/system leadership. Both organizations worked together on the guidelines for over two years to address the changing hospital and physician relationships.

While there can be different leadership structures within organizations, they should involve theses core principles:

• Physician and hospital leaders with similar values and expectations; aligned incentives and goals with appropriate metrics; shared responsibility for meeting financial and quality targets; accountable service line teams; shared strategic planning and management; and shared focus on patient engagement as partners in their care.
• Interdisciplinary structure that supports collaborative decision-making, while preserving clinical autonomy for physicians.
• Integrated clinical and hospital leadership, including nurses and other clinicians as well as physicians, present at all levels of the system with participation in all key management decisions and accountability to and for each other on the team.
• Collaborative, participatory partnership built on trust.
• Open and transparent sharing of clinical and business information across the continuum by all parties.
• Clinical information system infrastructure for capturing and reporting performance metrics for all participants and system-wide accountability for those measures.

The report further fleshes out the principles in the context of physician organization, leadership development, and cultural adaptations. It also identifies and briefly explains potential challenges.

Source: Integrated leadership for hospitals and health systems: principles for success. American Hospital Association; American Medical Association, June 2015. http://www.aha.org/content/15/ahaamaintegrleadership.pdf

Posted by AHA Resource Center (312) 422-2050, rc@aha.org