Board of Directors

Diverse viewpoints on boards of governance for hospitals and health systems are important for success. In this podcast, Ellen Brzytwa, R.N., trustee at the Cleveland Clinic, discusses her mission of bringing more nurses into board positions, and how her own experience demonstrated that more hospital boards should have nurses as members.

This study compares the relative percentage and composition of non-operating revenue among Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs), Rural Prospective Payment System (R-PPS) hospitals and Urban Prospective Payment System (U-PPS) hospitals. This information may be important to hospital executives seeking to improve financial performance, and to policymakers to understand how non-operating revenue affects hospital financial performance.

First reported among frontline caregivers in the emergency department and ICU, pandemic-related burnout has spread to impact nearly everyone in the hospital and health system, including the board room. This article recommends strategies to prevent board chair burnout, such as a well-defined job description, delegation and limits on expectations.

A simple truth of governance is that a significant part of a board's effectiveness depends upon the quality of the board chair. This webinar from the American Hospital Association Trustee Services outlines key issues involved in the relationship between a board and its chair, as well as effective steps to clarify an explicit role and job description for the chair.

This brief from the American Hospital Association discusses involvement and oversight by boards of directors in ending violence against hospital employees, and it provides resources to help leaders build safer workplaces and communities.

This article from Health Catalyst shares information and strategies for how organizations can more effectively engage their boards of trustees in quality and safety measures.

This recent Boardroom Brief from the American Hospital Association Trustee Services highlights the board's role in health equity, and explains how hospital and health system boards can prioritize health equity at their organizations.

Great governance rarely happens without a great board chair. Yet too often, insufficient attention is paid to ensuring that chairs are well suited for this critical role. Lessons about this important issue can be learned from the stories of four health system board chairs in this article from the American Hospital Association's Trustee Insights.

The role of a health care organization trustee gets more complicated and sophisticated every day. Pressures are increasing around higher quality, lower cost, more transparency and accountability, and the use of evolving and expensive technology. This toolkit from the American Hospital Association will help boards adopt a data-based governance approach to assessment and decision-making.

The constant strain of workforce and financial issues are proving difficult to solve for rural health care providers. In this American Hospital Association (AHA) podcast, the president of the board of trustees at Memorial Hospital discusses the role board members can play in helping their hospitals and health systems navigate today’s pressing problems, and how the AHA’s resources and educational materials can provide assistance.

The latest revisions to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement program underscore the integral role of board members in advancing quality improvement initiatives, writes Sue Ellen Wagner, the American Hospital Association's vice president of trustee engagement and strategy.