Orlikoff Preaches Inevitable Change at NHHA Annual Meeting
To view PowerPoint Presentations from the meeting, click here...
Keynote speaker Jamie Orlikoff set a dynamic tone at the New Hampshire Hospital Association's 78th Annual Meeting, as he posed challenging questions and outlined some frightening possibilities that face board members and CEOs in the face of a rapidly changing healthcare delivery system.
"Landmark Supreme Court rulings, impending presidential and congressional elections, continued economic challenges, payment reductions, government regulation and sanctions, clinical transformation – the challenges, risks, and tasks facing governance of hospitals and health care systems are monumental and difficult to overstate," he said.
"To survive and thrive in this environment, all the while poised on a fiscal cliff, leaders must first recognize that the changes confronting health care are transformational and are NOT simply transactional," he added."This means that leaders must drive their organizations to become something different, as opposed to simply doing new things, or old things differently. To do this, leaders must work on the system as opposed to only working in the system.
"How does a board act to effectively guide an organization to survival and relevance in the future, which will be one of the most controversial times in modern health care?
"How do we identify practical leadership approaches to develop local organizational strategies to effectively address these changes?
"What can trustees expect and how can they act to keep their organizations ahead of not just the first curve, but the second curve of rapid change?" he asked.
To help meet the challenges outlined by Orlikoff, the NHHA assembled four break-out sessions to address many of the latest changes confronting hospitals. One session, "Lessons Learned from Medicare's Bundled Payments for Care Improvement Program," addressed the analytic, regulatory, data processing and outcome measurement drivers needed to move forward in redesigning payment systems to accommodate bundled payments, ACOs or Medical Homes.
Yet another, "Medicaid Managed Care," focused on legislation passed in New Hampshire during the 2011-2012 session that authorized the conversion of the Medicaid Fee For Service program to a Medicaid Managed Care model. While the State is moving forward with implementation of the new program model, there remain many outstanding regulatory, policy and operational questions yet to be answered, and those questions were squarely addressed by a panel of experts.
"The Partnership for Patients," a product of the Affordable Care Act, is fast becoming a national showcase for New Hampshire hospitals, where practitioners are engaged in some of the finest quality and safety work in the country, and as the nation prepares to elect a President, the intricacies of political activism amongst hospitals was the focus of the panel called "We Care... We Vote."
Larry Walker of The Walker Company also directed an interactive town hall-style forum during the annual meeting, in which audience members - armed with the latest technology - were able to voice their opinions on everything from the NH gubernatorial election to the creation of a state health plan for New Hampshire.
Among the honorees at the NHHA's Annual Awards Banquet:
- The James A. Hamilton Founder's Award winner was State Representative Laurie Harding of Lebanon;
- Harry Dorman, President and CEO of Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital in Lebanon, received the Leslie A. Smith President's Award;
- Jeffrey Powell, MD, of New London Hospital in New London, was presented with the Medical Staff Award for outstanding service to hospital and community;
- Alison Ritz, a member of the board of Speare Memorial Hospital in Plymouth, was recognized for her exemplary performance in hospital governance with an Outstanding Trustee of the Year Award, and;
- Concord Hospital, winner of the 2nd Annual Healthy Eating Active Living HEAL Award, which was created to recognize a Hospital Association member organization that has demonstrated significant progress in making the healthy choice the easy choice for its employees, patients and the community.
The final panel convened for the event was the Northern New England Association of Healthcare Executives symposium called "Green Hospitals and Healthcare," designed to help hospitals find new ways of becoming environmentally sustainable, as a way of cutting costs or in fulfilling their corporate citizenship mission.
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