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Monday, June 12, 2006

A Business-Based Prescription for Health Care

We recently posted about the travails of the leadership of Caritas Christi Health Care System in Massachusetts, culminating in the firing of the system’s CEO for violating the regulations he, himself, had signed about sexual harassment. This weekend, the Boston Globe ran a commentary on a prescription for “Giving Caritas a healthy future.” It was a prescription that said essentially nothing about the essence of health care, taking care of patients.

The writer was Ellen Lutch Bender, CEO of Bender Strategies LLC, a “healthcare consulting firm,”whose goals are “to enhance bottom line performance and increased market position for our health care clients as they plan for the future,” and a self-proclaimed “visionary.”

She advocated “hiring a strong, visionary, business-minded CEO ... [as] crucial to Caritas's long-term stability.” She asserted that hiring such a leader would be essential to support Caritas’ “healing mission,” but “that mission must be examined for what it is: a sprawling business in a complex, increasingly competitive, capacity-strained environment.” Furthermore, “the healthcare business demands specialized leadership and an organizational structure that supports innovative thinking and fearless decisions. Hospital CEOs must seize business opportunities when they arise.” Particularly, “the next CEO must possess exceptional fiscal management skills....” So, “the challenges facing Caritas argue for a CEO search beyond the traditional physician candidates.” And, “the church, the board, and the new CEO must craft a guiding philosophy balancing religious tenets, sensible business practices, and executive independence.”

Bender’s prescription never once acknowledges the real mission of hospitals, taking care of (mainly sick) people. To her, a hospital is only a “business” in a “competitive environment.” Her description of the ideal leader of a hospital requires no knowledge of health care, nor any commitment to the values of health care. In fact, Bender warned that a sufficiently “quick and nimble” leader would not be attracted “by a constraining, bureaucratic reporting system,” presumably one that actually required that leader to conform to a code of ethics, or put patients ahead of making “bold, foundational changes.”

This commentary makes very clear what sort of thinking pervades the current leadership of health care. Health care is a business, like any other, without any particular values or ideals that set it apart from manufacturing automobiles, or hauling trash.

This thinking has been going on at least since the 1980's, when Einthoven, one of the leaders of the managed care movement, called for breaking up the “physicians guild” and putting managers and bureaucrats in charge of health care in order to constrain health care costs. (See post here.)

Doing that, of course, has not constrained costs, not improved access, and not improved quality. It has lead to a huge increase in the number of health care managers, who now out-number physicians (see post here.) It has let top health care executives make a tremendous amount of money (see post here). It has given health care a few leaders hailed as “visionaries,” some of whom have been monumental flops. (See for example the case of the “visionary” CEO of Allegheny Health Education and Research Foundation, who ended up in federal prison, and whose health care system ended in the second-largest bankruptcy at the time in US history, here on pages 5-7.)

Maybe it’s time to get health care leaders who understand something about taking care of patients, and who put the mission first (and then let them hire savvy business-people to keep the finances in order).

ADDENDUM (July 16, 2006) Ms Bender also urged Caritas to follow the example of Catholic Healthcare West, which she described as "enormously succesful." Yesterday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Catholic Healthcare West just settled a lawsuit which alleged that the system "charged excessive and unfair amounts to the small percentage of patients who were not covered by Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurance, and then set aggressive collection agencies on them when they couldn't pay." These practices seemed to directly contradict part of Catholic Healthcare West's stated mission: "serving and advocating for our sisters and brothers who are poor and disenfranchised." Again, what may look like an "enormously succesful" organization to a businessperson may not appear to succesful to patients and physicians. I repeat: maybe it's time to get health care leaders who understand something about taking care of patients, and who put the mission first.

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