You Can Know What You Don’t Know: Board Education

Executives need information to run their health care organization.  I talk to CEO’s all the time about their challenges, and I have put the broad challenges into the following categories simply to apply some framework:

• Strategy
• Financial management
• Operations management

I consistently get the following feedback:  I don’t have the financial leadership support I need; I  need information; the board needs to be educated about the complexities of our organization; I am not even comfortable that the monthly information is accurate; cash flow seems to be low; we frankly have no idea if the billing department is doing a good job; any financial surprises in the near future may cause some pretty big problems for us, but we don’t really know; the results from the annual audit don’t correlate with monthly data I receive and I have no idea why; we think we’re fine, and then the audit comes along and the results are remarkably worse; we receive offers to sign capitation contracts, and yet we don’t know how to evaluate them; and many, many more comments like that.

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