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.
At Becker's 4th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, taking place November 2–5 in Chicago, more than 1,500 hospital and health system executives tackle decisions that determine whether organizations thrive or merely survive: protecting margins under cost pressure, choosing where to grow, renegotiating payer relationships, stabilizing the workforce and proving real ROI on technology. This is where leaders work through them together, face-to-face. Apply for complimentary registration now.