Hosptial Boss: Saving Lives and Saving Jobs

Mt. Sinai Hospital CEO Kenneth Davis discusses the science of being a CEO and how to manage a hospital when it seems like all forces are aligned against you.

These are tough times to run a hospital, especially one that doubles as a major research facility. Uncertainty surrounding the future of health care regulation coupled with slashed government funding for scientific research has put top-tier institutions such as Mt. Sinai Hospital up a financial creek. In 2003, when Dr. Kenneth Davis took over as CEO of Mt. Sinai, the hospital was losing millions of dollars a year. Since then, he has been able to give the institution a new, sustainable business model. Davis talks with Fortune about the science of being a CEO, how to treat the richest and poorest Americans with the same quality of care, and why you shouldn’t treat your surgeon like your golf caddy.

Kenneth Davis: Oddly, what prepared me the most to be an effective CEO here was being a scientist. Because to solve problems, you need data. And I realized that solving business problems was really the same as solving scientific problems: you get a lot of data, you have a hypothesis, you test it, and then you act, based on the information you accumulate. Somewhat less important, but still valuable, was my background in psychiatry.

I watched group meetings led by my predecessor in which there were a lot of people in the room who had different agendas. You could see that some people were motivated by their character flaws when the institution was in trouble. Everyone had a different reaction to a ship that was sinking, but all those reactions in many people didn’t lead to a successful problem-solving approach.

Read Full Article in Fortune.com

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