Renton, Wash.-based Providence is leaning into temporary and topic-based leadership roles as a way to improve its operations while giving more physicians an opportunity to contribute.
“We really don’t want to limit physician leadership contributions to only those people who are ready for a full-time or more permanent position,” Brendan Lloyd, MD, chief medical officer for care delivery at Providence, said on Becker’s “Clinical Leadership Podcast.” “So we’ve tried to identify places where physicians can contribute in a less traditional role. In some cases, those are focused on one area physicians have a lot of interest or excitement in; in others, it’s about having flexibility in the length of the engagement, so physicians can move in and out of leadership roles and balance that with other things going on in their lives.”
Some of the most popular topic-based roles have been in physician well-being, and innovation or application of technology. The system also opens temporary opportunities to match current events. For example, Providence has engaged a “busy obstetrics hospitalist who probably wouldn’t have been interested in a longer-term role” as a temporary leader to help the system prepare for significant changes to CMS OB billing, coding and documentation.
“That’s been a great place to open up new opportunities for new physician voices to contribute,” Dr. Lloyd said.
The system has benefited from these nontraditional roles. Dr. Lloyd said they have created more space for leadership voices that would have been missed otherwise, developed a deeper bench of physician leaders and created more opportunities to bring the right physicians into roles.
“We’re still learning how to best design these,” he said. “They aren’t without some of the usual challenges we have with physician leadership roles, like how we’re going to secure funding, or accounting for the impact of changes in clinical responsibilities, how those can affect patient access, or how they can affect the colleagues who work with those physicians. But we do think these are a really important part of our physician leadership.”
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