One Road Traveled: Redefining the Organization · Redefining the Organization Profiles in Healthcare Leadership Adapting to Healthcare Reform ... this is the direction we see ourselves

An Interview with Mark FreyPresident and Chief Executive Officer

Alexian Brothers Health System

One Road Traveled: Redefining the Organization

Profiles in Healthcare Leadership

Adapting to Healthcare Reform

Compass Clinical Consulting

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Compass Clinical Consulting’s “Profiles in Healthcare Leadership”

These profiles are the result of interviews with transformational leaders in today’s healthcare industry—men and women who have demonstrated courage, ingenuity. and the hard work needed to create dramatic, measurable and sustainable improvements in their hospitals. They challenge assumptions, see things differently, and enable remarkable breakthroughs. These leaders freely convey insights that we all can use to improve the way we deliver healthcare, and in the process, give us new ideas on how to make better American hospitals.

This profile features Mark Frey, President and Chief Executive Officer, Alexian Brothers Health System. Mr. Frey has been the driving force behind the behavioral health hospital’s growth and rise to prominence since becoming its leader in 1999. Under Frey’s leadership, the hospital pioneered cross-disciplinary alliances with neurologists and neurosurgeons to provide innovative treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other movement disorders.

The Alexian Brothers carry out the healing mission of the Roman Catholic Church under the guidance of the Alexian Brothers Health System (ABHS), which oversees the operations of the healthcare ministries and the senior ministries.

Ranked among the nation’s best-performing systems, the ABHS healthcare ministries are a comprehensive and diversified healthcare organization headquartered in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, serving more than two million people.

What’s really unique about the Alexian Brothers? They have an 800-year tradition. Not too many organizations can say that their roots are in the 14th century.

An Interview with Mark Frey

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Key Lessons for Healthcare Leaders

STRATEGIC QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER IN THE FACE OF HEALTHCARE REFORM

• Do you need to align with another organization?

• If aligning with another organization, what characteristics are you looking for to best meet your needs?

FROM FEE-FOR-SERVICE TO A POPULATION HEALTH MODEL

• How do you refocus the hospital in the face of less inpatient care as more care is going to be delivered in the ambulatory setting and in patients’ homes?

• Engaging physicians into the new clinical enterprises must mean being more patient-centric and less hospital-centric.

HOW TO MANAGE FINANCIAL CHANGE FROM EVOLVING BUSINESS MODELS?

1. Lower your cost structure. You cannot compete without lower costs. But as you lower the cost of healthcare, you have to ensure high quality, high safety, and high reliability.

2. Create partnerships. Think about how to create and maintain strategic partnerships with other organizations so that patients are really “in network” in networks of health systems where they stay for their care. Health systems in the future will not be successful if they can’t gain some sort of control over where patients go.

3. Restructure your entire care management system. Patients need to be treated across a continuum of care, from A to Z.


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ATTRACTING MORE PATIENTS

1. What’s your argument? You may have the best patient care experience and provide the best safety and quality, but you have to have something that is your argument – your uniqueness – for people to use your system to the exclusion of all others. What is it?

2. Recruit exceptional physicians.

3. Engage your staff. It drives the patient care experience and will help attract more patients. If you’re not working closely with your staff, not getting the doctors what they need, not giving them a voice, not including them in decision-making, then you’re not engaging your staff. How can a positive patient care experience be created without that? It can’t.

FINDING THE RIGHT PEOPLE

• Refocus the organization from looking to the people in the C-suites to the people providing the care.

• Demonstrate that new focus by being out, being visible, going to visit the sites, and talking to people in the field, and don’t filter your communications through layers of bureaucracy.

• Constantly communicate what’s important: your mission, your values, and why you’re here.


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THE INTERVIEWCary D. Gutbezahl, MD, Chief Executive Officer of Compass Clinical Consulting, sat down for a “Profile in Healthcare Leadership” with Mark Frey, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Alexian Brothers Health System.

Dr. Cary Gutbezahl (CCC): How has Alexian Brothers Health System changed in response to everything that comes along with healthcare reform?

STRATEGIC FIT FOR AFFILIATIONSMr. Mark Frey (MF): The system has changed dramatically. First, we merged with Ascension Health in 2012. The path that got us there goes back to 2009, when we first said to both the Board and the sponsors, “There are significant changes ahead in the market, and we are not appropriately positioned for the future.” We acknowledged in the spring of 2009 that, as an organization, we are simply not prepared for the rather dramatic changes that would occur in the future. That brought us to a decision point where we needed to figure out whether we were going to align with some other organization or try to maintain our independence. We opted to not maintain our independence.

The next question became, do we remain in a regional network or do we look for a national relationship? We chose to move into a national relationship with Ascension, partially because, unlike a lot of other organizations, we have multi-state companies that we’re accountable for; our senior care division was completely outside of Illinois, and all of acute care was in Illinois, where we have no senior care programs. We concluded that we needed to find a strategic partner that would be interested in what we were doing in senior care and would want to maintain that and use it in a positive way. We also needed a strategic partner to help determine what our next steps would be in the Chicago market.

When we joined Ascension, there were three major components to that relationship. First, we benefited from a great deal of intellectual capital and strategic support. We also now has a strategic partner that would help us define our new acute care strategy here in Chicago. Finally, we ended up with a partner that is very interested in what we were doing in senior care, and ultimately, is going to use that as a jumping off point to create a new company—I’ll talk more


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about that. So, I would say that one major change has been to move from where we were as a small, well-run, but somewhat insular organization, to becoming part of one of the largest healthcare companies in the United States.

If I take a step back and ask, how has the new framework of being a participant in a very large national healthcare corporation changed us? I think that the major change that I’ve seen is that we are moving away from a hospital-centric environment to a more robust way of thinking about clinical integration. We now ask ourselves about how to form strategic partnerships to achieve clinical integration and how to get the geographical coverage, the scale, and the essentiality we need to compete in the Chicago market. Nobody is really going to be able to do this alone because it’s too vast and complex a market. There is such an extraordinary interplay between suburban hospitals, the county facilities, the academic medical centers, and all of the city hospitals, and so you’re seeing the market consolidation going on in the Chicago metropolitan region as these networks of varying types are forming to become more capable of managing value and managing populations.

I qualify that a little bit because I’m not so sure that the market is completely ready for risk-based contracting. And I’m not even sure that all health systems themselves are fully prepared to do the work. But I do think that we are evolving away from a fee-for-service model, where everything is driven by revenue and revenue growth and how much work can we do in hospitals, to something that looks far more like a population model, where the goal becomes one of health, well-being, and keeping people out of the institutions. In effect, we are trying to answer the question, “What’s our responsibility to the community to keep its members healthy?”

We have crafted an important relationship with a strategic partner on a national level—one that solved our senior care problem in terms of where we’re going with that service. It solved part of our problem in the metropolitan market here because we got better expense control around supply chain, insurance products, and clinical engineering. We also put better systems in place for quality and safety and for productivity management. All of those infrastructure needs are now being supported by the parent organization, and yet at the same time, the strategy for what we do in acute care is still being driven by us.


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REDEFINING OUR VISIONMF: As we move forward in a very different reimbursement environment, we realize that we have to expand from our traditional hospital-centric approach to an organization that also has an extraordinary commitment to a physician enterprise, whether it’s employed or independent, and galvanizing the work we do throughout that enterprise, creating a clinical integration enterprise, which is focused on affordable care, focusing on ACO products, ACE products, capitated lives and commercial products and so forth. We still have a very strong commitment to hospitals and the hospital enterprise, and we believe that all three of those areas are going to work together in important ways. I think that you do need to have some semi-permeable boundaries around what the physician enterprise is focused on, what that clinical enterprise is focused on, and what the hospital enterprise is focused on. Will that be the model 10 years from now? Maybe not, but I think it’s a good model for today.

CCC: Is the model coming from Ascension Health, or is it locally developed based upon insights and resources that Ascension Health provides?

MF: Ascension has done a very good job of crafting a strategic direction that says that we’re committed to something other than fee-for-service because we just think it’s inevitable that we have to move away from this model. That strategic direction says that we cannot continue to be hospital-centric because so much more care is going to be delivered in the ambulatory enterprise and in patients’ homes. Outpatient care becomes an increasingly large part of our business, and it continues to grow every year.

I think that Ascension has gotten the strategic direction right for the entire organization and yet, rightly recognizes that everything that happens in healthcare is local. While you may see macro trends evolving, you still need to be able to put them into a local solution that makes sense for an individual market. I don’t think that you can say, “Here’s the strategy that you have to use to implement the strategic direction.” Instead, we operate under the view that this is the direction we see ourselves going—it’s where we want our markets to go. How you get there really is going to be a function of what’s needed in your communities.


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CCC: As you look into the future and see the changes occurring where population health becomes a bigger issue for health systems, and there’s a migration away from what has always been the cash cow of healthcare – the hospital – how do you manage that financial change as it occurs and keep the whole enterprise afloat?

MF: That’s really the money question for everybody. Because you’re migrating, as you rightly point out, from what has been the business and financial model in healthcare to a brave new world of the future. So, how do you survive in this environment?

First, you lower your cost structure in ways that you were never challenged to do before. In the past, revenue covered all sin, so as long as revenue was coming in, you didn’t really have to be as efficient as other industries have had to become. We in healthcare are far from the ideal model of efficiency. To the contrary, I think we’re probably as inefficient as you could get in any industry.

So there’s huge opportunity to improve in probably a thousand ways that we were never challenged to do before. You bring your cost structure down to something that is far more cost effective. It benefits the entire country, it benefits your health system, it benefits your local hospitals, and ultimately it benefits consumers. But as you lower the cost of healthcare, you want to ensure high quality, high safety, and high reliability—I think that’s your goal. That’s one strategy.

Your second strategy is that you are going to have to create, in partnership with other people, networks that not only allow you to rationalize services and become more efficient, but also keep patients in that network. Currently, when patients need tertiary-coordinated services that we may not provide or choose not to provide, patients may go just about anywhere. There’s no coordination between us and the tertiary provider, even though we hope the patients will return to us for care in the future.

So, if you’re thinking about developing your system, you have to begin to think about how to create and maintain strategic partnerships with other organizations so that patients are really “in network,” in networks of health systems where they stay for their care. Patients can go anywhere, whenever they choose, and I don’t think that any health system in the future is going to be successful if they can’t


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gain some sort of control over where patients are going. If the patients go out of your network, you have no idea how you can coordinate their care or even where this care is being provided and what the quality will be. If you go at-risk for any of this, you need to know answers to these questions about partnerships and keeping patients in your care network.

I see people developing these networks of care and then grafting high quality care management systems in these networks across organizations. Within these networks, the management of the patients becomes more efficient, more predictable, and more understandable to patients and their family. Ultimately, we will provide care that is better coordinated than it has been historically. So besides the issue of the cost, it will be very important to keep people in these managed networks.

The third strategy is to increase the funnel of people who come into your system, however you do that. It may be because you develop a special expertise in certain areas that you’re simply the best at it, and this draws people in. You have the best patient care experience, and you provide the best safety and quality, but you have to have something that is the argument for people to use your system and to use it to the exclusion of others.

You have to press on all three of these levers, and you have to do it in a way that they all work together. I think those are the transition steps you have to take. In the end, you could have all of those things working well and remain fee-for-service, you could go at-risk and become population managers, or you could operate in some combination of the two. We obviously are going to some new future model that will look very different from what we are used to. I think that two things have to happen: one is you need to make that successful transition structurally and operationally so that you stay viable as a business, but you also are building the infrastructure for the future that will allow you to either flip a switch or gradually and incrementally move into this new model. There may be multiple models, which will largely be determined by government and by private payers. We act as though everyone has concluded that it’s going to be a risk-based system, and maybe it will be. I think that will happen in some markets but maybe not in others. Is everyone going to look like Southern California? I don’t know.


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PREPARING FOR RISK-BASED PAYMENTCCC: There are a lot of different kinds of risk-based payment systems, from the traditional capitation to some sort of episode-based or annual look-back at the disease burden that people had or even just a bundled payment for procedures including both pre- and post-hospital care. I don’t know that anybody knows which one is really going to dominate. It’s still very much the experimental phase. How has your organization or your parent organization looked at those different options?

MF: Because Ascension operates in so many different markets, and the markets are all moving at varying rates of change, we have an opportunity to try out a variety of models. Depending on where you are in our system, you’ll see three, four, or five different types of models for risk-based management being played out in the market. Here at Alexian, we have about 40,000 to 45,000 lives now in our ACO. We’re in the Shared Savings Program. I can’t tell you how that’s going to play out. It could be very interesting. We’ve invested a lot of resources in building the infrastructure, and we’ve learned a great deal. I have no idea whether there is even a nickel of savings that we are going to share with the government, because we haven’t seen the data.

We’re doing some IPA (Independent Practice Association) work right now where we’re managing lives, and we are looking to partner with the state of Illinois to manage care for Medicaid recipients. So I see us doing a lot of different things, and I think you’re right—nobody really knows where we’re going. We are trying to take what I would consider to be reasonable risks and making reasonable strategic bets on where we think the future is going.

Personally, I favor something that is risk based. It can work when the incentives are lined up the right way, but your guess is as good as mine whether the payers are going to support that. And that will vary by market. From a preference perspective, I do think that a risk model aligns incentives in ways that you may not be able to achieve in any other way.

CCC: You mentioned clinical integration, improvements in patient safety, and quality. Could you talk a little bit about the activities that have been underway to help bring those changes?


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MF: Certainly. About two years ago, we didn’t have anybody overseeing clinical integration. It didn’t occur to us, and now it’s the fastest growing part of the organization. We’ve brought in great executive leadership for it; we’ve built some infrastructure under those executive leaders. We’ve put in the ACO, and we’ve put in the IPA. This entity manages our “managed” population, and we’ve moved our employees into that area as well. So we have made some significant investments there.

At the same time, we’re restructuring our care management system. I wanted to better understand just how many people are out there doing care management in our system, so I asked the question. The analysis came back that we had 200 FTEs in care management. And every single one of our organizations has their own system of care management. Acute care hospital A, acute care hospital B, the physician enterprise, the behavioral health hospital, the rehab hospital—you could just go down the line. Every aspect of our organization had a care management system, but no one talks to each other or works together, so our patients experienced episodic treatment within our own health system.

As we are building our clinical integration enterprise in terms of building the infrastructure to manage population health, the next step is to take on the entire care management system. I don’t care whether I save money on this or not. What I want to make sure is that patients are being treated across a continuum of care and that when we treat any given patient, we see the patient through the care experience. If we send the patient to post-acute care in his/her home, in a skilled nursing facility, or in the rehab hospital, people are still connected with that patient. I want us to challenge ourselves to understand how well we performed handoffs, how the outcomes were, how much the patient’s care was improved, and whether the follow-ups are in place because in the end, better coordination reduces cost and improves the patient care experience. You need to be fully invested in that patient from day one all the way through the end of that patient’s care. We can’t think that we did the surgery, so we’re done. Nor can we think that if you go to rehab, we’re done after rehab does their part. We need to think that now you’re going home, and the rest of your care is as an outpatient, but you are still under our care until you are fully recovered. For chronic illness, that may be for the rest of your life. We won’t ever be “done.” I want to know who’s working with this patient all the way through from A to Z. So we’re restructuring that whole enterprise right now.


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We’ve also restructured our approach to quality. We began by bringing in all of our local hospital boards and our executive leadership and physicians from all those hospitals on a regular basis to work on the quality of the entire enterprise. Our quality people are there, our doctors are there, and our executive leadership is there, all in one room talking about and thinking about how we deliver highly reliable care and improve safety, quality, and the patient care experience. Everybody is working together as a team to help achieve those goals and objectives. So there’s been a lot of reorganization over the last five or so years to move us from a good system to a more high-performing system and a system that’s better positioned for the future.

WHAT WE VALUE IS KEY TO COMPETITIVE SUCCESS

CCC: One of the things that you talked about was finding some way of capturing more patients to come through that system. At this point in time, have the changes that you’ve made in improving care management or quality and safety been able to generate more capture of your local market?

MF: I think so, but it’s always hard to attribute market share growth and volume growth to anything in particular. We’re obviously a safer health system. We’re a higher quality system. And the patient care experience clearly has significantly improved over a number of years. We have continued to develop the service lines. We continue to recruit exceptional physicians. We continue to use information technology to improve care. All those things play a part, but often it’s hard to point to anything specific and say this is why we’re growing and doing better.

I would suggest that any administrator who is not focused on all of those things at the same time is probably missing opportunities to build that funnel to attract more patients and to build market share. In the end, they are all drivers of growth. I don’t think you can say that this is the only thing that matters, so I will only concentrate on doctors or I will only concentrate on quality. You have to ask, “What are the 5 to 10 things that are mission critical?” And you cannot overlook the importance of staff engagement. We score very high on employee engagement—among the very highest in Ascension. Does that drive the patient care experience and bring more people? Absolutely. How do you get your work


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done? Through your doctors, nurses, and staff members. There’s no other way to do it. So if they are not being attended to, if you’re not working closely with them, if you’re not getting the doctors what they need, if you’re not giving them a voice, if you’re not including them in decision-making and helping them operate your system, then you’re not engaging your staff, no matter where they are in the system. How do you build growth in a positive patient care experience without that?

I’m fairly certain that engaging our staff is helping to attract more people. When we conduct focus groups and consumer awareness studies, we’re told that when patients come to us, they want to stay here because they have great experiences and because the people are great caregivers—they’re invested, they do great work, and you get great outcomes. All of those pieces work together to give you the ability to grow your market share, and these days, if you’re growing, you’re growing at someone else’s expense.

FINDING THE RIGHT PEOPLE IS CRITICALCCC: One of the hardest parts of leadership is building the right team of people, which is about choosing the right people and getting them really engaged. You’ve obviously done a great job with that. Could you tell us a little bit more about how you go about getting folks engaged to get that flywheel going?

MF: From a personal perspective, a lot of it is remembering first and foremost that the least important part of the organization is the people who are in the C-suites. The most important people are the people who are delivering the care. I don’t ever want anyone to forget in executive leadership that we are here to support the people at the bedside. That’s the only reason we’re here. It’s the only reason we have jobs. It’s the only reason, presumably, that we’re in this business. So, first and foremost is setting a tone that reminds people that as servant leaders, our job is to support the people at the bedside. The second thing is, if you’re going to do that, then you need to demonstrate your interest by being out, being visible, going to visit the sites, talking to people in the field, and not filtering all of your communication through layers of bureaucracy.

I try to keep the bureaucracy very thin because I don’t want messages being filtered through layers and layers of people. From the people who take care of


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patients, I want to know, what are your challenges? What’s working for you, and what’s not working for you? I don’t want people to feel like they have to run that through 20 channels. If you want to send me an email, if you want to come and visit me, if you want to call me, if you want to talk to me when I’m doing rounds—I’m thrilled by that because to me, we’re here to help them, not the other way around.

The third part is constantly communicating what’s important: your mission, your values, and why you’re here. We work really hard to live the mission, and we work really hard to be a highly ethical organization. We take the care of the poor and the vulnerable very seriously. We tell people that, we show people that, and we make sure we give them permission to do that work because if you don’t, you send mixed messages because there are times when you have to focus on finances or market share. So, you have to constantly send the right messages, or you end up with an organization where people are confused. They’re confused by what you stand for, and they’re confused about what you believe in.

Remembering why we’re here, going out into the field and talking with people, constantly communicating what’s important, showing people what’s important and demonstrating that you’re living your mission and that you’re living your values—there’s a thousand ways to do that. You don’t start board meetings by focusing on finances. You start board meetings by focusing on mission, vision, and values. You challenge yourself by asking, are we living these things? Are we making progress on working through quality, safety, and high reliability?

The last thing is how we are doing financially. It’s not that I don’t care about that; I care about that a great deal. But I think that you get great financial results when you have people who are firmly invested in your business and believe in the work that you are doing. They’ll do great work if they believe in the work. You may, in the short term, get good financial results if you drive in a different direction, but I think if you want a sustainable organization and want to provide great healthcare, you need to do what you’re supposed to be doing every single day. Don’t take shortcuts. Don’t compromise when it comes to quality and safety or ethics. Every day, you have to try to have the highest quality, most ethical organization that you can.


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If building a great team is our greatest asset, then gathering assets is what you do as a senior leader, which is finding the best possible people you can. They not only have the skillset to do the job, but far more importantly, they have a personal mission and values that are aligned with what you do.

In our case, we come out of an 800-year tradition of the Alexian Brothers. Not too many organizations can say that their roots are in the 14th century. We’ve had a lot of time to perfect our understanding of our mission and how we express our mission and values. So, we try to hire people who exemplify the things that are really important to us. Obviously, they have to be great technically, and they have to have good critical thinking skills, but in the end, just as important is that they really get what is important to us as an organization and that they live those values. If they do, then they’re aligned with us, and we have the right people.

CCC: Many organizations though find it challenging to find the values that they need within a person who also has the technical capabilities they want. Yet, you cannot afford to keep positions vacant for long. The reality is that service must be provided regardless of staffing issues. You have patients who come through the door, and you need enough people to take care of them. How challenging is it to find the right person so you don’t have to carry a vacancy for too long?

MF: That’s an interesting question. We don’t have a lot of turnover. When we have a vacant position, it doesn’t stay vacant for very long, especially in leadership positions. Usually, if there is a change, it’s because people retire from the organization—not too often for other reasons—so that helps. When we do need to hire someone, we make sure we know what’s important to look for in a candidate. People come to me and say, “Here’s what I’m looking for in a candidate,” and they give me a laundry list of maybe 20 things. I tell them there’s nobody who has all these qualities, and you don’t have to find somebody who was all 20 things. If everything seems important to you, then ask yourself what can you live without and what are the top three, four, or five things that you really need. The rest we will work with through ongoing education, training, experience, and so forth. We’ll mentor and coach them in the areas where they’re not as strong.

There are certain things that you can’t coach and that I don’t think you can teach. And that has to do with fundamentally who people are. Are you empathic? Can


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you listen to another person? Are you willing to understand another person’s perspective? Do you have a value system that’s consistent with ours?

I don’t think we can teach those things. I think you either come with those personality traits, and we recognize that you have them on day one, or you just don’t get hired here. You either have it, or you don’t. I am skeptical that these things can be taught as easily as some of the more technical things. If you’re not as good as you can be at critically thinking or you need help on finance or strategy, we can teach you, and you can learn that technical stuff; non-technical stuff is more complicated to learn at this stage in your career.

CCC: Mark, thank you very much for your insights into leading change.


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About Mark Frey President and CEO of Alexian Brothers Health System

A 25-year Alexian Brothers employee, Mr. Frey previously served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital, Chief Executive Officer of the Alexian Brothers Rehabilitation Hospital, and Vice President of the Alexian Neurosciences Institute. He has been the driving force behind the behavioral health hospital’s growth and rise to prominence since becoming its leader in 1999. Under Frey’s leadership, the hospital pioneered cross-disciplinary alliances with neurologists and neurosurgeons to provide innovative treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other movement disorders.

Frey completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago, his Master’s of Social Work at Loyola University of Chicago, and his Juris Doctor at the Illinois Institute of Technology/Chicago-Kent College of Law, and has held a number of administrative and teaching positions.

About the Alexian Brothers Health SystemThe Alexian Brothers carry out the healing mission of the Roman Catholic Church under the guidance of the Alexian Brothers Health System (ABHS), which oversees the operations of the healthcare ministries and the senior ministries.

Ranked among the nation’s best-performing systems, the ABHS healthcare ministries are a comprehensive and diversified healthcare organization headquartered in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, serving more than two million people.

The Alexian Brothers Health System also has an enduring commitment to identifying and developing an effective response to the unique health and housing needs of older adults through a dynamic senior ministries program that operates an array of residential, retirement and community resources.

These ministries exist to continue the Alexian Brothers mission of caring for the sick, the poor and the dying and promoting the physical, mental, spiritual and social health and well-being of all individuals we serve.


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About Cary D. Gutbezahl, MD President and CEO of Compass Clinical Consulting

Dr. Cary Gutbezahl understands what it takes to make better American hospitals. In addition to being a seasoned consultant, he has worked as interim hospital CMO in three different organizations, as well as served as medical director for two multi-specialty medical groups and several HMOs. He has a solid history of leading medical staff through improvements in utilization management, changes in peer review practices and corrective-action procedures. As Chief Executive Officer of Compass Clinical Consulting, he is armed with a diverse background in hospital, medical-group and managed-care settings and has immersed himself in developing the strong knowledge base and extraordinary skill set needed to successfully improve today’s hospitals.

While Dr. Gutbezahl served on active duty in the U.S. Navy, he was Head of the Quality Assurance Department of the Navy Medical Command, National Capital Region, in Bethesda, Maryland. He is board certified and completed a laboratory medicine residency and an immunohematology fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition to his numerous national speaking engagements, Dr. Gutbezahl has authored a number of publications including “Hospital Service Recovery” in the Journal of Hospital Marketing and Public Relations. He also has been published in Hospital & Health Networks Magazine, Trustee Magazine, SmartBusiness Magazine, The CEO Refresher and writes frequently for the Hospital Accreditation Journal. Dr. Gutbezahl can be reached via email at [email protected].

About Compass Clinical ConsultingSince 1979, Compass Clinical Consulting has been helping hospital leaders build Better American Hospitals. By reducing costs while improving patient safety and quality of patient care, hospitals are better positioned to serve their community and meet ever-changing expectations. We have walked miles of hallways at hundreds of hospitals. We bring experienced eyes that have seen just about every kind of issue possible. And working in close collaboration with us, our clients have achieved remarkable results.

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One Road Traveled: Redefining the Organization · Redefining the Organization Profiles in Healthcare Leadership Adapting to Healthcare Reform ... this is the direction we see ourselves