CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Huron Consulting Group (NASDAQ: HURN), a leading provider of business consulting services, today announced the release of its annual Huron Healthcare CEO Forum Report which provides insights from leading healthcare industry executives on how they are responding to the rapidly evolving healthcare landscape.
The report titled, “Leading the Journey: Cultivating Success in Healthcare,” offers perspectives from more than 30 senior executives from healthcare organizations across the U.S., including large multi-hospital systems, academic medical centers, and community hospitals, who participated in the fifth annual Huron Healthcare CEO Forum.
The CEOs agreed on key strategic imperatives for 2015, including an emphasis on improving quality and lowering costs while preparing for value-based models of care. To meet these imperatives, many CEOs are focused on significantly improving financial performance – by 20 to 40 percent in most cases, over the next three to five years – and on maximizing the human potential within their organizations to meet the challenges of change.
“The transformation currently taking place in the healthcare industry requires leaders to see ahead of the curve,” said Gordon Mountford, executive vice president, Huron Healthcare. “CEOs and senior hospital executives must embrace this change while implementing new strategies in order to chart a successful path forward.”
Three key areas – Risk and Reward, Population Health, and Consumerism – emerged as focal points for the CEOs in the report:
RISK and REWARD: Payers and providers are increasingly focused on identifying new partnerships and ways of doing business. CEOs are committed to striking the right balance as the traditional business model is challenged by industry-changing forces. Collaboration was also a repeating theme as declining patient volume, higher consumer expectations regarding cost, quality and care experience, and emerging service-line competitors will require greater alignment between payers and providers.
“The old model of healthcare leadership, which focused on maximizing command and control, is not likely to be effective in this new environment,” said Keith Pitts, vice chairman, Tenet Healthcare Corporation. “It is very unlikely that a single entity will be able to own and/or control 100 percent of the healthcare delivery system that its patients use. We are entering an era where new relationships and new partnerships will provide answers.”
“The payment model is growing more complex at the same time the payer mix is changing,” said Jeff Jones, managing director, Huron Healthcare. “We are in an environment where the collective actions that lead to improved cost and quality require close leadership attention and strategic management.”
POPULATION HEALTH: There is a pronounced shift from managing episodes of care to taking responsibility for population health. As CEOs prepare for this transition, they are developing strategies to build readiness such as data analytics, determining what new partnerships might be needed, and identifying the changes to infrastructure that will be needed.
“Population health is bringing together communities of providers and patients in a highly digitized, information-based community, all with the goal of meeting the Triple Aim of improving care, improving health, and reducing cost,” said Joe Zubretsky, senior vice president, Aetna.
Dr. Rob Schreiner, M.D. and Huron Healthcare managing director, commented on one approach for how healthcare organizations can time the transition: “Organizations must assess their brand, market share, and competitors in a given market. How an organization ranks across those three business dimensions can have a predictive value on how aggressively that institution might pursue population health opportunities.”
CONSUMERISM: The CEOs agreed that the new healthcare landscape will be influenced by the rise of consumerism, as technology and transparency in a digital world give price-conscious patients more choices and a larger-than-ever role in defining the future.
“Providers that invest the resources to engage consumers also see benefits on the cost side,” said Dr. Andrew Ziskind, M.D., managing director and Clinical solutions leader at Huron Healthcare. “There is growing evidence that consumers who are engaged and active in their own care are less costly to serve and have better outcomes. This is a key component of delivering higher quality care and also benefits the organization financially, under both fee-for-service or value-based models.”
Each year Huron Healthcare gathers CEOs at its annual Forum from both payer and provider organizations along with executives in other industries to share their visions for the future and discuss how they are navigating a new healthcare world with the Affordable Care Act and increasing competitive forces.
Huron Healthcare’s CEO Forum Report, “Leading the Journey: Cultivating Success in Healthcare,” is available for download at www.HealthcareCEOForum.com.
About Huron Healthcare
Huron Healthcare is the premier provider of performance improvement and clinical transformation solutions for hospitals and health systems. By partnering with clients, Huron delivers solutions that improve quality, increase revenue, reduce expenses, and enhance physician, patient, and employee satisfaction across the healthcare enterprise. Clients include leading national and regional integrated healthcare systems, academic medical centers, community hospitals, and physician practices. Modern Healthcare ranked Huron Healthcare third on its 2014 list of the largest healthcare management consulting firms. Learn more at www.huronconsultinggroup.com/healthcare or follow us on Twitter: @Huron.
About Huron Consulting Group
Huron Consulting Group helps clients in diverse industries improve performance, transform the enterprise, reduce costs, leverage technology, process and review large amounts of complex data, address regulatory changes, recover from distress and stimulate growth. Our professionals employ their expertise in finance, operations, strategy and technology to provide our clients with specialized analyses and customized advice and solutions that are tailored to address each client's particular challenges and opportunities to deliver sustainable and measurable results. The Company provides consulting services to a wide variety of both financially sound and distressed organizations, including healthcare organizations, leading academic institutions, Fortune 500 companies, governmental entities and law firms. Huron has worked with more than 425 health systems, hospitals, and academic medical centers; more than 400 corporate general counsel; and more than 350 universities and research institutions. Learn more at www.huronconsultinggroup.com.
