Physician Leadership Program
Integrating People and Data to Build Better Healthcare
Today's physicians are experiencing unrelenting personal and systemic stress. Expanded clinic hours, pandemic challenges, workforce mental health concerns, and productivity pressures have created unprecedented demands. A McKinsey US COVID-19 Physician Survey indicated that physicians might seek additional partnerships for financial support along with reports of increased feelings of burnout.
As physicians provide the frontline of care with mounting operational, financial, and leadership challenges, access to management tools is key to impactful decision-making. At Chicago Booth, we’ve listened to physicians and created an executive education program to meet physicians’ unique set of challenges.
Chicago Booth’s Physician Leadership Program provides the tools to help lead multidisciplinary teams and implement effective decisions based on true business metrics. By attending, you’ll grow as a leader and streamline your path to management.
The Chicago Booth Physician Leadership Program is a physician-only program designed to elevate the evidence-based decision-making and leadership skills of physicians in administration roles seeking to accelerate sustainable, profitable growth for their healthcare organizations.
Participants will:
- Understand the drivers of financial health and quality measurement to strategically navigate public reporting requirements, hospital and physician rating systems, and value-based payment programs.
- Discover how to use data-driven evidence to benchmark against the competition and to justify and drive organizational change to improve results.
- Cultivate a positive, healthy work environment that builds employee loyalty.
- Explore enduring, profitable growth that may occur when combining effective leadership with strategic, analytical decision-making skills within a health-care organization.
- Build a personal leadership tool kit that supports authentic leadership and influence
- Identify, replicate, and nurture successful management behaviors throughout an organization.
Leadership Challenge
Participants will be presented with a multi-faceted leadership challenge that simulates a real hospital business problem. The leadership challenge will incorporate patient outcomes, finances, and personnel/leadership issues, and participants will incorporate relevant data to form hypotheses and justify action plans.
This program is designed for physicians in administrative leadership positions who lead clinical divisions or report to a chair of their departments in academic and/or private health-care organizations. This program will also be useful for new section chiefs, department chairs in hospitals, physicians in private practice taking on more oversight and leadership, and younger physicians aspiring towards health-care leadership positions. This program is an excellent fit for physicians who are in the leadership capacity to create healthy team environments, improve practice efficiencies, and reduce physician burnout.
Suggested titles include: Chair of Medicine, Chief Medical Officer, Head of Surgery, Chief Clinical Director, Senior and Vice Chairs of Clinical Departments, Medical Director with similar responsibilities as a Chair, and Dean or Head of Clinical Affairs
Recommended profiles include...
- Physician leaders who are responsible for the strategic direction of a business unit, including allocating resources/staff, managing finances, and creating policies.
- Senior physicians within private organizations who are responsible for managing large health-care cross-functional teams.
- Physicians who are board certified or board eligible in a recognized medical and/or surgical specialty.
- Physicians identified as high performers within their academic organizations
Dan Adelman
He co-directs the Booth Healthcare Initiative and also leads the Healthcare Analytics Laboratory at Chicago Booth, in which teams of students work on real-world projects with providers to improve healthcare delivery through the analysis of large datasets. The lab has conducted projects in population health, hospital readmissions, bundled payment reimbursement, case mix optimization, hospital scheduling, nurse benchmarking, and others. He has served on the faculty advisory board of the Harry L. Davis Center for Leadership. He publishes regularly and has served as Area Editor for Operations Research, the flagship journal of the field. He teaches regularly in Chicago Booth's Executive MBA Program.
Adelman received a PhD in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research in 1997 from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also received a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering and a Master of Science in Operations Research. He is a recipient of the George B. Dantzig Prize for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice.
Adelman joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 1997.
Bruce Gewertz
Prior to joining Cedars-Sinai, Dr. Gewertz served on the faculty at the University of Chicago (1981-2006). There he enjoyed a regional and national referral practice in vascular surgery and established a basic science laboratory focused on cellular mechanisms of ischemia-reperfusion injury, which was funded, by the NIH and American Heart Association. For the last 14 years of his tenure at the University of Chicago, he served as the Dallas Phemister Professor and Chair of the Department of Surgery.
Joining Cedars-Sinai Health System in 2006, he has focused on ensuring that hospital operations support the institution’s academic mission. In his position as Vice-president for Interventional Services, he has provided professional leadership and oversight for our surgical and interventional operation which encompasses a large number of clinical venues and departments. The Department of Surgery at Cedars-Sinai has added to its academic stature by targeted recruitments across all specialties more than doubling clinical revenues while expanding the clinical faculty by 50%. Five surgical clinical programs are now ranked in the top 16 in US NEWS and World Report including the #2 programs in GI surgery and the # 3 programs in heart surgery and orthopedics. Annual expenditures from federal grants have increased from $250,000 per year in 2006 to a projected $13.8M (direct and indirect) this year. This places Cedars-Sinai in the top 15 surgery departments in the country in NIH funding and contributes the largest fraction of our $17.3M of total research funding.
In his role as Vice-Dean of Academic Affairs, Dr. Gewertz has been focused on enhancing interdepartmental and institute relations to further clinical and research achievements. He has been particularly interested in supporting academic recruiting and restructuring successful academic units into new departments such as orthopedics and cardiac surgery. More recently he has shifted to outreach to our new health system partners, assessing needs and building productive relationships.
Dr. Gewertz has established a new direction in his personal research and now focuses on the role of human factors in clinical performance and the importance of emotional intelligence in personal and professional development. The basic approach has been developing objective measures of efficiency and safety in diverse situations such as the emergent care of traumatic injuries and other surgical scenarios. These efforts have resulted in more than 250 publications, significant grant funding (exceeding $4M) as well as prestigious speaking engagements indicating broad national recognition. His more than 175 external talks have included more than 30 named lectureships. Along with David Logan, he authored a bestselling book on physician leadership (The Best Medicine: A Physicians Guide to Effective Leadership, Springer, New York, NY, 2015).
In the clinical arena, he is nationally and internationally known for his personal experience in the treatment of carotid artery disease and mesenteric ischemic syndromes. His large clinical practice has led to authorship of two popular textbooks (Atlas of Vascular Surgery, published by Elsivier with now 2 editions in 7 different languages and Surgery of the Aorta and its Branches, published by Saunders).
The Chicago Booth Physician Leadership Program offers a unique approach to learning consisting of several sessions and a leadership challenge that ties learnings together into one immersive experience.
Program Sessions
Measuring and Managing Outcomes and Costs
- Develop a foundation in understanding how patient outcomes and costs are measured and managed, and their consequences for the financial health of the hospital.
- Learn the various methods of risk adjustment and their pitfalls, including the inherent trade-offs between measures.
- Understand how to leverage data to maximize the value proposition of improving outcomes and lowering costs.
Evaluating Value-Based Incentives and Initiatives
- Building on an understanding of how hospital revenue is generated, explore the economic structure of value-based incentives and risk-sharing contracts and their connection with outcomes measurement.
- Learn how to evaluate and benchmark the financial, clinical, and operational impact of new, not-yet-proven approaches to care delivery as data-driven experiments to improve value.
Understanding Dynamics of Physician Leadership
- Review a model of professional development that enumerates the specific skill sets needed to progress in influence and position across time.
- Identify the attitudes and behaviors needed to function at the highest levels when presented with a wide range of professional and personal challenges.
Dealing With Complex Physician Relationships and Performance Evaluation
- Through a specific case study, determine the most effective methods to produce positive outcomes especially in personnel driven management challenges. The effects of such conflicts on institutional culture and subsequent performance will be considered.
This program requires an application to enroll. To apply for the program, candidates must submit:
1. A completed application
2. A resume or CV
Applications are accepted and reviewed on a rolling basis. During the review process, a member of the admissions committee may contact you or your executive sponsor to discuss your application.
To learn more about the application process, please contact us at exec.ed@chicagobooth.edu or +1 312.464.8732.
I truly appreciated how the faculty presented complex information in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-follow format.
- Caitlyn Foote, MD, Chair of Department of Dermatology, Christie Clinic, LLC
All of Professor Adelman’s sessions were incredible. I entered the program with very little knowledge about data collection and the financial aspects of medicine. And I left the program ready to tackle my department’s budget and delve into the nitty gritty of our analytics.
- Michael Kissen, MD, Director, Division of Regional Anesthesia, Cedars-Sinai Health System
This program deepened my understanding of leadership and its pluses and negatives. The professors were exceptional. There was a sense of camaraderie among the learners and faculty, far more than I would expect in such a short time. I highly recommend this program for up-and-coming and established leaders.
-Robert Hostoffer, DO, KM, MSMed, MBA, LhD, FACOP, FAAP, FCCP, Associate Professor of Pediatric, Case Western Reserve Medical School, Professor of Allergy and Immunology, LECOM, President, Allergy/Immunology Ass. Inc