Integrated Delivery: Innovating Leadership for Outstanding Healthcare Outcomes
Integrated Delivery: Innovating Leadership for Outstanding Healthcare Outcomes
David Stehlik | 2015
Abstract
An Integrated Delivery System (IDS) in healthcare refers to a network joining hospital care, ambulatory care, long-term care, and business support services for myriad benefits. Essentially, the whole system provides a qualitative benefit that cannot be gained individually through its components. In the same way, today’s thinking and practicing of leadership is too factious to fully leverage the multitude of insights. The popular models and theories, while extremely helpful, tend to emphasize leadership behaviors that are best applied in defined rather than shifting contexts. Fast-paced industries and slow-paced industries may have operated under diverse leadership assumptions in the past, but this is a day of mergers. Most obviously, when fast-paced technology meets slow-paced regulated care, and when slow-paced engineering meets fast-paced emergency rooms, the story changes before our eyes and the world is no longer so easily separable. Simultaneously, the clarion call of industry is for innovation, but should we think so simply about innovation as we have about leadership? How has that worked out for us?
This book is about a new framework for leadership, a model that innovates upon the current paradigm directing leadership thinking, promoting a forward-thinking framework that integrates the best business and social concepts, strategies, and practices to healthcare. Like its namesake, this integrated leadership model, is about bringing the best leadership assumptions and practices together so that their weaknesses amidst shifting environments are buoyed by the others’ strengths. Prior to my detailing of the integrated leadership model, however, you will find out how “organized medicine” has changed over the decades (Chapter 1 ), what innovation really means (Chapter 2 ), and how to think clearly about strategic management and its constituent parts (strategic thinking, strategy development, and strategic planning) (Chapter 3 ). Then, the other models which helped contribute conceptually to the development of the integrated leadership model along with the model itself are discussed (Chapter 4 ). The chapters that follow (Chapters 5-7 ) explore each of the three primary modes of leadership behavior (anticipatory, strategic, and administrative) that keep an organization focused and refreshed throughout its various innovation-minded, effectiveness-establishing, and efficiency-building pursuits. For those wondering about integrating the model into their leadership habits (or scaling it for their organizations),Chapter 8 includes a short story about a healthcare organization in which the model is not spoken of, though its existence should be clearly perceived. The imaginary organization will illustrate ways in which the theory that undergirds the model and the practices which bring it to life can have a home in your organization.