At New York City-based Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center, Practice Administrator and Department Director Chrissy Manning manages more than 50 people with inpatient and outpatient responsibilities. With the facility's Department of Orthopaedic Surgery seeing more than 35,000 outpatient visits and performing 2,000 operations per year, Ms. Manning has worked with physicians to improve care quality and productivity.
Here are five thoughts on hospital leadership and physician management with Chrissy Manning, who is also director of technology solutions at the Swiftpath Program and COO of medical IT company DTC Healthcom.
1. Effective leaders research, do their homework and constantly look beyond their own role. "One needs to educate themselves as a manager and investigate as much about the organization as a whole as possible. It's not just about what is my job. It's who are the people? How does the organization get things done? What is the flow? If you do not ask these questions, you will not really know your role and the current status of what you are taking over," Ms. Manning says.
2. Hospital leaders deploy specific tactics to manage their staff successfully. Some tactics Ms. Manning uses are "consistency — mixed messages will destroy your leadership status," she says. Also, "it is important to know when to be strict and when to be lenient," she says. In addition, "not everything is about interesting innovation. Respect the value of the daily boring work. The seriousness of the daily boring work is important. A good leader finds a balance between leading people through daily grunge work and interesting innovation."
3. Non-MD hospital leaders need to find an MD leader and work with him or her. "In working with employed physicians, it is important that they have a defined physician leader. Develop a proper relationship with that physician leader where each of your roles are well defined and make sure the non-MD leader and the physician leader agree on who speaks to the employed physicians and on which topics," Ms. Manning says.
"One has to realize it's like a baseball team. The physicians are the star players, but they are not the entire organization," she says.
4. A hospital's front-line management's role is to achieve staff satisfaction so patient satisfaction is high. Front-line management must "manage the massive number of details that exist on the front line that need to be coordinated. They cannot underestimate the details, like how many people are waiting on lines, insurance authorizations [and] collecting co-pays. Managing the details and managing staff satisfaction properly will lead to patient satisfaction and a better healthcare system," she says.
5. Solidify your identity. Two important pieces of advice Ms. Manning received throughout her career include:
— "'As you become an administrator, the nature of the relationships with people you have worked with will change, but they do not have to be negative. You will answer to people outside your normal working pool and those people will depend on you to be a different person and you have to be comfortable with that.'"
— "'Know who you are and what your strengths are. Improve on your strengths, compensate for your weakness, but as a leader, everything counts.'"
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