An Inside Look at the IRS' Revised Form 990: Implications for Governing Boards
Program Length: 36 minutes
Cost: $169.00

Beginning with tax year 2008, not-for-profit organizations have been required to use the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) revised Form 990, with its 16 new schedules, including Schedule H, a new schedule for completion by tax-exempt hospitals. Following passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), the IRS issued further revisions to the Form. Hospital executives and their boards need to review these documents carefully to determine which of the schedules they will be required to file, and when the filing is required.

This program provides an overview of the guiding principles for the revision of the Form, and delves into the primary components of the Core Form and Schedule H, the schedule with the greatest impact on hospitals. It also touches briefly on Schedules J and O, and discussess opportunities to use the Form to tell your hospital's community benefit story.

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Building High Performance Governance: Seven Leadership Habits of Highly Effective Governing Boards
Program Length: 27 minutes
Cost: $169.00

Hospital governing boards do not become excellent by chance. They build excellence by purposefully practicing key leadership "habits" that work together synergistically to ensure long-term leadership effectiveness.

This program explores hospital governing “leadership habits” that boards should practice. Each leadership habit has a number of underlying supporting components that are carried out with purposeful governance practices. Adherence to these habits will ensure the right focus on the right issues and challenges, in the right way, at the right time. Boards that pay close attention to practicing these leadership habits will find that their governance processes will improve, their leadership skills will be enhanced, and the quality of their governance decision-making and strategic focus will be sharpened.

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The Board's Fiduciary Responsibility
Program Length: 20 minutes
Cost: $169.00

As the ultimate authority for the hospital, the board sets the overall agenda and charts the course for the future. The board is responsible for operational effectiveness, strategic direction, establishing and nurturing the corporate culture, ensuring CEO success, and maintaining a careful balance between meeting community needs and ensuring financial viability. To accomplish this, each board member must provide strong, insightful and balanced leadership.

This program explores the three main fiduciary responsibilities, which include the duties of care, loyalty and obedience, and ways those duties are carried out. It also describes common roadblocks to a board’s ability to maintain fiduciary effectiveness.

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Driving Change: Integrating Mission, Values and Vision into Board Leadership
Program Length: 22 minutes
Cost: $169.00

Too often organizations develop mission, values and vision statements, and then don’t think about the statements again until the next strategic planning session. Successful boards know that these statements should be the primary driver for every hospital board discussion and decision.

This program explores the basic components of the mission, vision and values statements, as well as specific ideas for ensuring a continual focus on them. It discusses ways to use the mission, vision and values in strategic planning, and provides a list of big picture questions to consider as a part of the strategic planning process.

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Governance Accountabilities and Opportunities in the Quest for Quality
Program Length: 19 minutes
Cost: $169.00

Boards of trustees are ultimately responsible for ensuring the hospital’s quality and patient safety, and must take strong, organized action to establish and nurture an organizational culture that continually seeks to improve quality and patient safety at every turn.

This program explores the board’s critical role in quality and patient safety, and outlines questions trustees should ask about the quality and safety of care. It discusses quality issues and challenges in today’s health care environment, actions the board should take to ensure optimum quality, and ideas for board leadership.

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The Board's Role in Building Constructive Hospital/Medical Staff Relationships
Program Length: 19 minutes
Cost: $169.00

The hospital/medical staff relationship should be a trusting partnership, where both the medical staff and hospital work closely together to provide quality care for patients. Hospitals and medical staffs have differing perspectives and unique cultures, which can lead to a disconnect between the two. There are actions boards can take to improve hospital/medical staff alignment to build a high functioning, strong hospital and medical staff relationship.

This program highlights the challenges associated with building and maintaining a healthy and productive hospital/medical staff relationship. It discusses what causes misalignment, lists specific ideas to build trust, and defines steps to build alignment. It also discusses the role of the board in creating a culture of collaboration, consensus and commitment.

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The Board's Role in Strategic Planning
Program Length: 20 minutes
Cost: $169.00

Mapping a course for the hospital’s future is one of the most important responsibilities of the board. To successfully lead their organizations into the future, trustees must understand their role in the strategic development and implementation process.

This program explores trustees’ role in the strategic planning process. It discusses the importance of developing a strategic plan, includes an overview of the steps in the strategic planning processes, and outlines common reasons that strategic plans fail.

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Building Bonds: Pathways to Better Board/CEO Relationships
Program Length: 22 minutes
Cost: $169.00

Hospital CEOs and their boards must build and sustain vibrant, trust-based relationships in order to successfully navigate the opportunities and challenges in today’s complex and fast-paced health care world. That trust requires leadership excellence in a number of key areas, including clear and consistent communication, adherence to well-defined roles and responsibilities, and clear CEO performance expectations and accountabilities that are appropriately rewarded using responsible compensation assessment policies and procedures.

This program explores the importance of a strong relationship between the board and CEO. It discusses the importance of successful, evidence-based CEO compensation and evaluation in ensuring a strong and vibrant relationship.

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Ensuring Conflict-Free Governance
Program Length: 20 minutes
Cost: $169.00

The board has a fiduciary duty to ensure that all governance deliberations and decisions are carried out without conflict of interest, and always with the best interests of the hospital at the forefront.

This program explores what conflicts of interest are and how boards can prevent them. It describes the need for boards to establish a process to identify, report and address conflicts of interest, and prevent conflicts from damaging the governance process.

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Becoming a Community-Centered Board
Program Length: 20 minutes
Cost: $169.00

Hospital trustees face a broad array of complex challenges in their quest to meet the critical health care needs of their communities. Too often, trustees become so consumed with the organizational issues and challenges that they lose sight of the need to ensure that the hospital consistently and forcefully connects in meaningful ways with its community.

This program explores ways for boards to collaborate with key community stakeholders to build partnerships, understand community needs, build trust, and strengthen the hospital’s image. It includes a list of key components and questions to consider to test your board’s community centeredness, and provides an overview of key strategies to ensure a focus on community service and community health improvement.

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Infusing Quality Throughout the Board Agenda
Program Length: 19 minutes
Cost: $169.00

The expectation of informed, engaged and active participation in quality oversight and leadership should be the foundation for every board meeting agenda. Attaching a measure to the amount of board meeting time spent on quality is one way to stimulate boards to carry out their quality accountability, and raise their level of quality and patient safety knowledge, engagement and effectiveness. Being conscious of the amount of governance time spent on quality will raise its prominence on the list of board priorities. Quality should be at the forefront in board discussions and decisions on virtually any agenda topic.

This program explores the board's fiduciary duty to ensure quality, and how to avoid "quality fraud." It outlines current quality oversight recommendations, and provides actionable ideas for boards to ensure that they fulfill their quality responsibilities.

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Supercharging Your Hospital's Governance Substructure: How to Build Effective Committees, Task Forces and Advisory Councils
Program Length: 19 minutes
Cost: $169.00

Board committees, task forces and advisory councils are an essential component of effective hospital governance and leadership. They form the “substructure” that enables the governing board to focus on larger issues of policy, strategy and vision.

This program explores three basic types of substructures, and how to improve governance effectiveness by balancing the work of the board with these substructures. It describes the symptoms and causes of failing substructures and how to improve them, and provides six simple steps to supercharge substructure performance.

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Preventing and Curing Governance Diseases: Practical Prescriptions for Improving Governance Health and Wellness
Program Length: 24 minutes
Cost: $169.00

Multiple factors, either alone or in combination, have the capacity to dramatically influence and shape the quality of the board’s focus, dialogue and leadership outcomes.

This program explores a variety of governance diseases that can put hospital boards in the leadership ICU, including Dialogue Deficit Disorder, Knowledgdystrophy, Successionitis, Lackofinfluenza, Leadershipresbyopia and more. The symptoms and complications of each governance disease are defined, followed by recommended prescriptions for change.

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Creating a Positive Workplace Culture
Program Length: 19 minutes
Cost: $169.00

Attracting and retaining motivated, dedicated, high-quality employees is a constant challenge, one that will become even more critical as the workforce ages, demand escalates, and competition for workers intensifies. The board plays a pivotal leadership role in defining the workplace culture.

This program explores the board’s role in resolving workplace conflict, and leadership actions that the board can take to improve the workplace environment, such as developing a code of ethics, ensuring a clear strategic plan, involving employees in organizational decision-making, and ensuring that transparency is a high priority. It also provides a list of challenges that have the potential to be detrimental to employee morale that boards must be prepared to address.

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Governance "Never Events": Ten Leadership Failures That Should Never Occur in Hospital Boardrooms
Program Length: 26 minutes
Cost: $169.00

The National Quality Forum has identified 28 “never events,” errors in medical care that are clearly identifiable, preventable and serious in their consequences for patients, and that indicate a real problem in the safety and credibility of a health care facility. Just as preventing clinical “never events” from occurring is a vital quality and patient safety imperative, preventing potential governance failures is also critically important.

This program explores ten governance leadership failures, and ways boards can avoid them.

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Governance Self-Assessment: Building Accountability and Transparency in Governance Practices
Program Length: 23 minutes
Cost: $169.00

A comprehensive, meaningful governance self-assessment process can improve trustee understanding of the essentials of effective hospital governance, identify group and individual “leadership gaps,” and continually fine-tune governance to respond successfully to the unknown challenges of the future. The outcomes of the self-assessment process also create an ideal opportunity for the hospital board to communicate its commitment to accountable governance and leadership with employees and the community at-large.

This program explores the basics of conducting a board self-assessment, including the recommended frequency, common rating areas for the overall board’s performance and committee performance, identification of issues and priorities for the future, and assessment of individual trustee performance. It discusses ways to analyze self-assessment results and put the results to work, using the results to build “governance gain” and strengthen communication with employees and the community.

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