Money vs Mission - How Generic Managers vs Physicians Think

On Health Care Renewal, we emphasize problems in leadership and governance in large health care organizations, and how they affect health care professionals' attempts to carry out their mission, and ultimately how they affect patients' and the public's health.  Large health care organizations are increasingly lead by people trained in business, not health care professionals, thus generic managers.  The stewards of these organizations, the members of their boards of directors or boards of trustees, are also increasingly current or former managers without direct health care experience. Yet all too often, health care leadership is ill-informed, incompetent, unsympathetic or hostile to health care professionals' values, self-interested, conflicted, dishonest, or even corrupt.Recently, in an effort to "bridge the gap" between physicians and MBAs, a new article in Becker's Hospital Review by Todd Kislak discussed differences in the thinking and values among business trained health care managers and physicians.  The author, an MBA, listed nine issues on which MDs and MBAs have different views.  I have summarized below what appear to me to be the main points, somewhat reorganized from how he did it. Whether he meant to or not, Mr Kislak showed why physicians may have reason not to trust their new generic managers.  Making Widgets vs Treating PatientsMr Kislak wrote that MBAs see health care in terms of orderly, uniform and standardized processes, while p...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Management Tags: financialization generic managers ' coup d etat mission-hostile management mission-ignorant management pay for performance Source Type: blogs