In today’s healthcare environment, hospitals are doing what they can to get an edge, and to help, they’re turning to chief strategy officers.
“We’ve seen more healthcare organizations create this role in the last year or so” said Alicia Daugherty, practice manager, research and insights, at The Advisory Board. “As healthcare reform takes effect, payers are introducing new reimbursement models, patient demographics are changing, and M&A activities are intensifying.”
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All this turmoil in the industry is requiring health systems to rethink and re-orient their strategy, thus the need for someone to spearhead this process.
The best way to define the role of a CSO is to say there is no clearly defined role. That said, you can liken the best CSOs to chess grand masters, capable of seeing all the pieces on the board and able to see several moves into the future.
Some spend their time formulating strategy, others are tasked with executing the strategy, while yet others do a little of both. They may act as “internal consultants,” or as specialists because they have expertise in particular areas, such as mergers and acquisitions or government regulations.
Hospital CSOs are usually responsible for understanding how market forces are changing and how those changes will affect the services patients will need in the future, said Daugherty.
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One particular focus of CSOs, she said, is spending much more time building relationships with physician groups and other groups that may be offering services that the health system doesn’t have. That can include nontraditional provider groups like retail clinic operators and e-visit vendors.
Another focus is care delivery transformation, looking at several new models for delivering behavioral health services, for example, and trying to figure out which model is right for the hospital’s patient population.
Finding a competent CSO can be quite challenging, however. “Everyone thinks they’re a strategic thinker and that’s often not the case,” said Allison Rimm, former senior vice president, strategic planning and information management at Massachusetts General Hospital.
In today’s healthcare environment, CSOs must be able to juggle the variables that are affecting care delivery, including the Affordable Care Act and changes in insurance reimbursement, and then figuring out what it will take to provide high-quality care in an ever-changing environment and operationalize the new delivery models.
It’s all about “asking the right questions to the right people, at the right time and keeping them focused and on track,” she said.