When it comes to finding a CEO who will maximize hospital performance, the selection is complicated and may not necessarily come down to a single, measurable characteristic such as being a physician, Leon Moores, MD, wrote in a Feb. 1 op-ed published by South Florida Hospital News and Healthcare Report.
Dr. Moores, a practicing pediatric neurosurgeon, is also a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the Uniformed Services University F. Edward Hebert School of Medicine in Bethesda, Md., and professor of medical education at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Inova.
He recently researched clinical and financial performance of hospitals with physician CEOs compared to those with non-physician CEOs, which was published in the American College of Healthcare Executives' Journal of Healthcare Management in late 2021.
The single-year, cross-sectional study examined a randomly selected group of 190 hospitals with more than 40 beds, half with physician CEOs. Researchers considered three quality measures: actual/ predicted central line-associated bloodstream infection rates, acute myocardial infarction 30-day risk-adjusted mortality rates, and pneumonia 30-day risk-adjusted excess readmission rates. They also considered hospitals' return on assets and operating margin, and included 13 control variables, divided into two categories: hospital level and market level.
There were several study limitations — it used a single year of data (2016), for instance, which may not represent longer-term performance, and did not analyze additional hospital characteristics and/or CEO leadership traits, said Dr. Moores.
In the end, he did not find strong support for his hypotheses that hospitals led by physician CEOs would report higher levels of clinical and financial performance compared to those with non-physician CEOs.
"It turns out that, like leadership itself, leadership selection is a complicated business and there are likely no simple solutions to help organizations choose the leader best suited to maximizing hospital performance," Dr. Moores concluded.
View the full op-ed here.