Question

In order to determine where you may want to focus as a future healthcare manager, create an interview and conduct it with a professional in the healthcare management field, a fellow classmate or an instructor. Looking back at your Talent Inventory done in Unit 2, consider what area of healthcare management interests you as a future career. Develop a set of 10 interview questions that you will ask the individual regarding that career. Consider where your strengths and weaknesses occur and ensure that your interview provides you with a good understanding of what you will be doing. The interview should be conducted via over the telephone, or via email - if you choose email please include your instructor on the email train. To submit the assignment, list the name and title of the individual you interviewed, your questions and their responses. Then summarize the experience and your thoughts on the career you have chosen.

Answer 1

There are lots of questions you can ask to future healthcare managers, but I have listed few of those in details, so that it becomes easy for you to practice:

1. Smart primary care. What would it take to derive the majority of your income and profit from primary care in three to five years? What would that look like? What capacity would you have to buy or build or ally with to do that? What structure would make primary care a profit center instead of just a source of patient flow for the real profit centers? Do you recognize the elements that make a primary care practice “smart,” lean, effective and a true “medical home”?

2. Risk. Are there definable populations in your market whose health costs could be driven down by improving their health status?

3. Hotspotting. Eighty percent of your utilization and costs, typically, come from 20 percent of your patients; half of the utilization and costs come from 5 percent of your patients; and fully 20 percent to 30 percent come from the top 1 percent. Some of those patients just got hit by a bus or contracted a swift-moving cancer. This is their moment to need a lot of attention. But of that highest-spending 1 percent this year, 14 percent will still be in that category next year. Of the top 5 percent, the ones who use half of all the resources, nearly a third will still be in that category next year. Of the top 20 percent, those who use 80 percent of all the resources, more than half will be in that category the next year.

These are typically the long-term chronic patients who are not getting the real care and attention they need to stabilize their condition and keep them out of the ER or the hospital. If you are going to be at risk for some population, do you know who that top 1 percent or top 5 percent of resource spenders are? Do you know how to find out? Do you have a clear idea how you could lower their costs by serving them better?

4. Alliances, customers, partners. Who is going to work with you? Who will share the risk and the benefit of these new risk environments? Are there competitors—such as physician groups, specialty clinics, urgent care clinics or retail clinic chains—that are now potential allies? Are there employers in your area with whom you can work directly, either to be at risk for some aspect of their employees’ care (behavioral health, for instance, or spine care, or all primary care in a workspace clinic)?

5. Teams. What sort of clinical teams will you need to build to take on this kind of risk? What will make those clinical groups into teams, and not mere collections of clinicians with their own agendas? In what ways can the way you pay those clinicians tie them directly into the organization’s goals for each group of patients? How will the business structure, patient flow and workflow have to be different from what you have now?

6. Definition. How will the definition of “care” expand beyond your traditional inpatient and outpatient “sick care” concerns when you take on such risk? For instance, how can you affect outcomes and costs by putting behavioral health professionals into the care flow early and often? Consider this: The two top predictors of an individual’s health care costs are not physical. They are not body mass index, blood pressure or blood sugar level. They are stress and depression. Are you going to put yourself at risk for those health care costs without trying to do anything about those factors?

7. Setting. Where will such care have to be delivered? Through what kind of channels, and in what kind of environments? If your survival depends on managing the health risk and costs of populations, how do you bring the care to them? How do you snuggle up to your customer? What are the technologies that could put your relationship to your customer in her purse, on her desk, in her house?

8. Benchmarking. Are there organizations of your size and level of complexity, in markets like yours, that have done something like what you are navigating, that you could benchmark? How could you best find them? How could you best work with them?

9. Digitizing. Everyone is getting digital at once, but there is no mantra that makes it all work. It can be done seriously badly, even when working with market-leading companies. You can cripple your organization’s workflows, cut efficiencies and make your clinicians hate you—at the same time that you pay out checks as much as 10 times larger than you need to.

How much do you and your executive team actually know about the changing horizon of information capacities? How seriously have you studied it? Does that knowledge simply pad out your strategy, or does it drive it? How satisfied are you that the strategy and the company you are choosing to lead your digitization drive are the best for you? Or are you and your CIO simply buying the security of the imprimatur of a major company? How aware are you of the new technological capacities arising and being showcased in the Health 2.0 environment, in the open source movement or, in primary care, in the Ideal Medical Practice movement?

10. Healthy communities. If you are at risk for the health of a population, what could you be doing to help members of that population be healthier? The least expensive way to deal with disease is to prevent it. Many prevention methods range far beyond the medical environment. They have involved everything from a bicycle helmet campaign to better day care centers to traffic lights, community gardens, yoga classes and healthy cooking clubs. Do you know what the key leverage points are in the community you are at risk for? Have you asked them? Have you done the community health risk assessment mandated in the reform law?