American Hospital Association Environmental Scan

The 2013 American Hospital Association Environmental Scan provides insight and information about market forces that have a high probability of effecting the health care field.  It is designed to help hospital and health health system leaders better understand the health care landscape and the critical issues emerging trends their organizations likely will face in the foreseeable future.

This is a summary of the Environmental Scan:

Provider Organizations & Physicians

• Relying on the current primary care system is not going to be adequate
• A culture of performance excellence and accountability
• Hospitals and health systems will need to be much leaner in all ways

Quality & Patient Safety

• Medical schools are not doing an adequate job
• Cost savings opportunity in health care lies with supply-sensitive care
• Poor quality metrics could be penalized
• Enhancing care coordination during hospital-to-home transitions
• Concerned that public reports fairly and accurately reflect their performance

Information Technology & E-Health

• Delayed implementation of ICD-10
• Mobile health has been shown to reduce the need for hospital admissions and physician office visits
• This past year alone, health care generated an estimated 150 exabytes of information
• Coordinating care for patients with complex health conditions
• Hospital executives say they are very concerned about the cost and process of fully integrating EHRs

Consumers & Demographics

• Half of Americans will develop a mental illness
• Adult and childhood obesity
• Rise in chronic conditions
• 5 percent of the population accounted for nearly 50 percent of health care expenditures
• Most boomers are going to be working after age 65
• Families are the principal caregivers for our nation's older people

 The Environmental Scan 2013 is available at www.aha.org .  I recommend you to get the full scan on the website.

What Most Stymies Innovation and Creative Thinking?

Over the last 12 months, Healthcare Leaders are saying the word CHANGE!! to physicians and employees.  What is CHANGE in the eyes of leaders, physicians and employees?  Will they keep the Traditional and/or Ideal business model?  It took Mayo Clinic 100 years to become a world-class healthcare institution.  Leaders don't have the 100 years it took the Mayo Clinic to make all the CHANGES to sustain their institution for the next century. 

 Albert Einstein said  "You can't solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that created  it."  Let's look at survey data to find out if Leaders support the CHANGES.

The American Society Quality (ASQ) does a Quick Poll each month at www.qualityprogress.com, where visitors can take an informal survey.  Here are the numbers for all industries from a recent Quick Poll July 2012:

"What most stymies innovation and creative thinking?"

• Lack of Leadership support                     46.1%
• Fear of failure                                            23.0%
• No, dedicated time                                     18.4%
• Inadequate resources                                12.3%

The data tells us that Leadership doesn't want to change the culture and become high-performance learning organizations. 

Franklin Covey Leader Question

As a successful leader, I imagine your team's productivity is constantly on your mind.  Franklin Covey has surveyed over 350,000 employees from nearly all major industries asking them this important question: "How much of your time is spent on important priorities?"  The results are:


                30% - Spent on Important Priorities     70% - Spent on Urgencies & Irrelevancies

What would it be worth if your organization could reverse those figures?  How would it impact operations, customer service, sales output and the bottom line? 

Provider Organizations & Physicians should create a culture of performance excellence and accountability for performance and improvement in all key areas - health care and process outcomes, customer-focused outcomes, workforce focused outcomes, leadership and governance outcomes, and financial and market outcomes.

Hospitals and health systems will need to be much leaner in all ways.  Leadership teams are starting to realize how difficult this task will be using traditional cost management techniques.