Dr. Stanciu: What are some of the challenges you face on a daily basis?
Dr. Penders: There are challenges in multiple areas. First and foremost, medical leadership is responsible for maintaining and improving the quality of patient care and experience. One can expect frequent conflicts to arise when providers vary from established standards or disagree with established policies.
Additionally, there appears to be an increasing lack of a distinct line between administrative and patient care decisions. It is often a challenge to manage the conflicting incentives involved when cost containment and quality care are seen to diverge.
Dr. Stanciu: What are the metrics that measure success by a medical administrator?
Dr. Penders: Some would say that the financial status of the organization is an important metric. Measures such as length of stay, patient satisfaction, and numbers of clinically relevant adverse events are how the success of medical leadership is assessed.
I would argue that patient outcomes as measured by standard clinical tools are the true measure of the success of the efforts of medical providers led by a medical director. Increasingly, measures of population health will likely be used to measure the overall success of health care organizations.
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