Resource Library

Almost all hospitals face the issue of not having enough money to accomplish everything they would like to. So how does the board pick among winning ideas when it can’t afford them all? The resources needed to support operations and implement strategic initiatives can far surpass those available.

SAMPLE COMMITTEE CHARTER: EXECUTIVE EVALUATION AND COMPENSATION COMMITTEE Overall Roles and Responsibilities

Elaine Zablocki found that recruiting more minorities and women to the board takes new ways of thinking about, recruiting and orienting directors.

“What is the difference between governance and management?” is by far the question that not-for-profit executives and directors ask most often. Effective boards understand the difference between governing and managing; dysfunctional boards do not.

Hospital boards are beginning to take best practice cues from their corporate counterparts and modernize their communication methods by adopting board portals. A board portal is a secure “host”— i.e., an online storage system for managing trustee communications.

The following is intended to be an example that boards should adapt to meet their individual needs.

Governing boards traditionally call executive sessions from time to time to discuss confidential, proprietary or personnel related matters in closed session. In recent years, however, the increasing emphasis on board independence and vigilance has triggered a new use for executive sessions.

This is the second in a series of collaborative leadership tools for CEOs. The first one presented a new model of collaborative leadership.This one focuses on clarifying trustees’ and CEOs’ expectations of each other. It includes a simple exercise for helping trustees and CEOs refine the way they work together.

Health care governance has entered a new era of heightened accountability, scrutiny and reform. This era imposes significant new burdens and challenges on boards and has raised the bar on what is required and expected of them. As a result, many boards are shifting their focus away from strategic leadership toward becoming compliant custodians.

As governing boards seek greater diversity in ethnicity, race, and gender, they face a significant challenge: how to successfully recruit women and minorities with pertinent professional backgrounds and governance skills, while other not-for-profits and corporations seek directors from the very same pool of candidates.

Asset stewardship has long been a key board responsibility. As fiduciaries of a health care organization’s assets, governing boards are required to act in the best interest of the organization, ensuring that resources are used in a reasonable, appropriate and legally accountable way to meet community health care needs.

Many governing boards are frustrated because most board meetings and committee meeting agendas are so full of both important and routine business that little time is left over for interactive discussion and questions concerning highly significant or future-oriented strategy and policy issues.

Hospitals and health systems generally employ more physicians than executives. At the same time itʼs likely that the board of directors spends far more time on compensation issues in the C-suite than on physician compensation and its associated regulatory and business risks.

Collaborative Leadership: A New Model For Developing Truly Effective Relationships Between CEOs and Trustees is the first in a series of tools developed specifically for you, the hospital or health system CEO, to help you take the lead in dealing with this change in ways that will stabilize and strengthen relationships with your board.

Today, slightly more than 50 percent of the nation’s hospitals identify themselves as being part of a health care system. Systems come in all shapes and sizes. Some are large and comprise many hospitals across a wide region, including, among others, nursing homes, physician groups and insurance companies

Purpose: The hospital is committed to ensuring that it achieves standards of excellence in the quality of its governance and has adopted this policy describing the duties and expectations of directors. Application: This policy applies to all elected and ex-officio directors and is provided to directors before they are recruited for appointment to the board. Each director must confirm in writing that he or she will abide by this policy.

The following is intended to be an example that boards should adapt to meet their individual needs.

Board self-assessment is widely recognized as a fundamental building block of continuous governance improvement. For the past 20 years, many healthcare organization governing boards have engaged in full board performance evaluations, often on an annual basis. These evaluations are designed to assess the board’s knowledge of its roles and responsibilities and how well the board as a whole is discharging them.

Purpose: To ensure that members of the board have a common understanding of the role of governance, the board has adopted this Statement of the Roles and Responsibilities of the Board.