New hospital CEOs must bring strategic plan for future

In an ever-changing healthcare landscape, hospital leaders must think long and hard about what they want in a new CEO, making the hunt much more challenging than it was 15 years ago, according to Hospitals & Health Networks.

Texas Health Resources in Arlington wanted a new leader who had a grasp of the most recent healthcare trends and could address change head-on and with ferocity, Ann Bass, chairwoman of the hospital board, told H&HN. "It's a very interesting world that we live in with respect to healthcare. It's really changing very rapidly, and so I think one of the things that executives these days needs to be able to do that maybe they didn't before is be able to be conversive about the complicated, national governmental area," she said.

A big factor in new leadership is their long-term vision for the future of the organization, according to the article.

The new CEO for Texas Health--internal candidate and former COO Barclay Berdan--will now have to deal with Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement issues. To tackle this and other issues when he begins next month, Berdan plans to execute the last two and a half years of the hospital's 10-year strategic plan, with a special focus on access, affordability, wellness, new partnerships and team-based care, according to the article.

The plan also takes into consideration patients as vocal consumers. In the past four months, Texas Health announced it would share all quality data with the public to help foster accountability, as well as an affiliation with CVS Caremark and 34 of its clinics in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to add access for its patients, according to H&HN.

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