As debate continues to rage around Mylan’s decision to raise the price of EpiPens, a commonly-prescribed emergency medicine for life-threatening allergies, hospital and health system leaders can learn from the mistakes company executives made.
Paul Keckley, Ph.D., a health policy analyst and editor of The Keckley Report, writes in an article for Hospitals & Health Networks that every healthcare organization should take time to review what went wrong for Mylan and what their own organizations can do prevent a similar outcome if they’re faced with a potential crisis.
He says there are three main lessons for healthcare executives:
- Healthcare secrets aren’t easy to keep under wraps. Patients share experiences, Keckley writes, so secrets don’t stay that way for long. Information spreads in other ways, too: analysts look at other research, employees may share stories and political staffers listen in on earnings calls. Furthermore, healthcare costs are common talk in middle class households as healthcare spending continues to grow.
- Board members must be aware of, and manage, executive activities. In Mylan’s case, its board members allowed executives to take actions that hurt other shareholders, according to Keckley. Boards must balance “profit and social purpose,” he writes, and decisions like pricing changes must be transparent to everyone with a stake in it, including the public.
- C-suite executives must take better care when responding to a crisis. Mylan’s CEO, Heather Bresch, made a less-than-stellar impression on the public in her response to the outcry about EpiPen pricing, Keckley writes. Hospitals and health systems could face crisis at any time, so it’s incredibly important that CEOs and other leaders are prepared to effectively manage their response--and behavior--in those situations, he writes.