Mar 01, 2022
Chief medical officers (CMOs) play a critical role as the driving force between a hospital’s vision and its physicians. Your responsibilities include improving the quality of healthcare services, budget development, building community relationships, and countless others. With the healthcare industry ever-evolving, the CMO’s role has expanded and become more important than ever.
So how can you ensure your team consistently implements best practices at work while pushing your hospital’s vision forward? Start with a few simple questions:
- What does your hospital stand for? Innovation? Education? Serving the community?
- What do your hospital’s future goals look like? Growth? Value-based care? Advancing technology?
- How can you lead your current and future physicians to align with these?
Although the answers to these questions will vary greatly between facilities, they provide you with a simplified, approachable way to view your hospital. Now consider how they apply to each department.
A hospital system only works as well as its departments work together. Think of the rest of your leadership team: chief nursing officer, chief financial officer, VP of care management, chief information officer, and others. What do the above questions mean to each of these department heads? You need to find the common denominator across departments. Find the goals each team can work toward together.
As you go through this process and narrow down the cross-department goals, you’ll begin wondering how to communicate this to your team of physicians.
When you approach your doctors with new information, you should think of it as selling a product to a consumer. If you can properly communicate why they should care, you’ll likely notice an increase in cooperation and implementation. Perhaps the most important question you can ask yourself is, “So what?”
Imagine you need your team to implement a new patient visit process in a move towards value-based care. Although most physicians support increasing the value of care provided, human nature tends to push against change. Now’s the time to ask yourself, “So what? Why should they care?” But don’t ask yourself this question once. Whatever answer you come up with, ask yourself, “So what?” again. And again. Ultimately, you’ll curate a compelling argument that appeals to the physicians’ desire to provide patients with high-value care.
As you continue to nurture your hospital’s vision and align it with your departments’ goals, your work doesn’t stop after the initial implementation. Have conversations with those doctors who really embrace the organization’s changes. What excited them about the change? What made the change easier for them to embrace? Learning what encourages your high-performers will not only help you train your current team, but it will also help you hire new talent with similar traits.
For more information about strengthening your physician team and hiring new talent, click here to learn about Inline’s unique approach to physician sourcing.