This is the last week of our Women in Healthcare series, which we began last month in honor of Women’s History Month. Healthcare Finance News asked some of the women leaders in the nation’s healthcare industry to talk about the role of women in healthcare.
Today, we hear from Helen Darling. As president and CEO of the National Business Group on Health, Darling leads an organization that helps businesses across the country be smarter about purchasing healthcare. Among the many committees she is involved with, she is the co-chair of the National Priorities Partnership, a program convened by the National Quality Forum. She was honored last month by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), which bestowed on her a Health Quality Award for her leadership in promoting healthcare quality as an issue of commercial competitiveness.
Q: What role do women have as decision-makers/leaders in today's healthcare sector?
A: They play a lot of different roles. I’ll start with the question of leadership. I think that women in general, and this will be a generalization, but I do think that they are demonstrating over and over in every field that they are leaders. And there’s something almost inherent – if it’s not inherent it’s socialized into women – that make them leaders of a different style, which is more compatible with the current generation and the future. I think leadership and vision are very important for the future of healthcare.
In addition, interestingly, many of the health professionals that are engaged in healthcare and are shaping the future of healthcare are women. … I don’t have the data at my fingertips, but we already know that for some years now the number of women entering the freshman class of medical school is very significant and I believe it’s gone over 50 percent in the last few years. We also know that women play a major role in all walks of life now. In addition, they also are bearing the children and raising (them). They are more organized, I think, in my judgment, and partly because they’ve always had to multitask, and that’s very compatible with the future. It’s interesting that a lot of the styles and qualities that have actually worked against women in a world of men is now, as the world has changed, as corporations have changed, as everything has changed, our culture has changed, our society has changed, women have come to the forefront of almost everything.
Q: What do women bring to the table to shape the future of healthcare?
A: I think their growing knowledge and education. There are many more hospital administrators or people in the pipeline to be leading hospital administrators (that) are women. Catholic hospitals have had leading women for a long time but that was pretty unusual. That was kind of a subset of the hospital industry. But now you have many more women in the administrative pipeline. You have many more women physicians and you have nurses – I don’t think I could overstate the importance of nurses in healthcare today. … (T)hey were always important, but what’s different from say, 20 years ago, is that women nurses and nurses who are men, in a few instances, are becoming infinitely more important both in policy circles and think tanks and research organizations that are influencing the future of healthcare. The head of the American Board of Internal Medicine is Chris Cassel. She is fantastic and she has been leading her field before even ABIM … and she’s just a perfect example of what’s happened in this country in healthcare and in the future of healthcare. She is personally shaping the way people in medicine think about what their role is. It’s not just to deal with the patient, the single patient in front of them. They still have to do that, too, but their job is actually much broader than that. It’s really to be responsible for the health of the population and for all the resources that we could expend on healthcare. They have to be professionals and fiduciaries, really, for the finite resources that we have to spend on healthcare. So she’s just one example. I could just go on and on naming top women in the field. …
Q: What do you personally believe should be the path forward to better care and lower costs?
A: Improved patient safety is the most important thing, and improving patient safety requires a combination of process re-engineering throughout the health system and a commitment by everyone from the top down in hospitals, and nursing homes too, but let’s just say hospitals, especially academic health centers, to have a culture of safety in which there is no avoidable harm. If we get that right we will also save a lot of money because there’s so much waste and overuse and misuse in the health system that doesn’t provide any clinical value. If we actually remove all of that out of the system we will probably save somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the $2.8 trillion economy that we have now.
Follow HFN associate editor Stephanie Bouchard on Twitter @SBouchardHFN.