Being an effective leader starts with understanding your own strengths and weaknesses. That is one of the most important lessons Roshan Prabhu, MD, took away from the Clinical Leadership Development Program at Bayhealth.
“The part of the program that had the biggest impact on me was the introspection … to understand who I am as a leader, my leadership style, my approach to people and my own biases,” said Dr. Prabhu, a member of the program’s inaugural class that graduated this summer.
“It’s really important to know yourself and who you are as a leader before you can work and collaborate with other people,” he added.
Launched last year, the nine-month program is designed to empower Bayhealth physicians and nonphysician providers to take on the complexities of leadership. The program helps bridge the knowledge gap between medical training and the unique demands on clinical leadership in a modern health system.
Bayhealth is part of the AMA Health System Member Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
The leadership program consists of monthly, half-day, interactive sessions led by Bayhealth’s executive leaders and experts. They covered key topics such as self-awareness, health care finance, organizational structure, executive decision-making and effective team collaboration.
Each session pushes participants to zoom out from their specific clinical expertise to better understand the many moving parts and complexities of running a robust health care system.
“We get so focused on our day-to-day tasks and patients, but understanding the bigger picture helps make you a more well-rounded clinician,” said Michelle Devern, NP-C, a nurse practitioner at Bayhealth Primary Care, Harrington, who was also a member of the inaugural leadership program class.
Professional growth and development
A desire to expand their knowledge beyond clinical comfort zones was a common theme for the physicians and nonphysician providers who applied to the program.
“It was an opportunity to understand how things work in this system beyond the individual departments that I'm involved in and to collaborate with leaders from various departments in our organization,” said Dr. Prabhu, who is also a hospitalist and the associate program director of the Apogee Hospitalist Group and the associate program director for the Bayhealth Family Medicine Residency in Dover, Delaware.
For other participants, even just learning the fundamentals of leadership itself was new and exciting territory.
“Leadership wasn’t a big part of my education, so this was a good opportunity to learn more about it and how to function as a leader,” said Adrianne Fisher, FNP-BC, a nurse practitioner at Bayhealth General Surgery, Dover, who was also in the program’s inaugural class.
Participants also learned about clinical topics outside of traditional patient care. For instance, as a general surgery nurse practitioner, Fisher has little interaction with Bayhealth’s population health services, but through the program she had the opportunity to learn more about these services. “Knowing these resources are available for our patients is really valuable,” she says.
Bayhealth’s commitment to invest in leadership by supporting physicians and other clinicians’ professional growth through this program offers clear benefits to the system as well, including improving engagement, satisfaction, recruitment and retention.
“Programs like this really are what drive our professional growth in the hospital system and help get more buy-in from clinicians who work here,” said Dr. Prabhu. “One of the really cool things about our organization is they really foster growth and development. That’s one of the big reasons I’ve stayed here at Bayhealth.”
Leadership is a key pillar of the AMA Joy in Medicine® Health System Recognition Program, which empowers health systems to reduce burnout and build well-being so that physicians and their patients can thrive.
Personal reflection
In addition to professional development, the program focuses heavily on personal growth and reflection.
While the very nature of leadership is to guide others through their professional journeys, participants spend significant time doing a deep dive into their own personalities and behaviors. The goal is to help them recognize, identify and leverage their distinct strengths and weaknesses to shape their personal leadership style.
This enhanced self-evaluation helped Dr. Prabhu evolve as a leader who oversees 24 family medicine residents and 36 hospitalists. Most notably, he recognized that issues often arise that pull leaders away from people management unless there is a problem with a team member.
“Being a leader is more than just managing people. It's also about developing, building and managing the programs,” he said. “That takes a lot of the time, so it can be very easy for positive reinforcement or encouragement to fall by the wayside—especially in a career like medicine, which demands perfection from a lot of people.”
As a result of this realization, Dr. Prabhu started making a concerted effort to prioritize relationship-building, positive reinforcement and encouragement to help foster a more open, positive and supportive culture among his team.
Seeing the big picture
Beyond self-discovery, the program bridges the gap between clinical training and leadership demands by focusing on topics outside of traditional medical training.
For Dr. Prabhu, delving into the nuts and bolts of health care finance was both eye-opening and challenging. While most physicians understand that health care is a major driver in the U.S. economy—with health care spending accounting for about 17% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—it’s often less clear to physicians what this looks like in action at their own health systems.
This gap in knowledge became clear to Dr. Prabhu during one of the sessions led by Bayhealth CEO Terry Murphy, MHSA. When Murphy asked the program participants if they knew how much money the organization spends annually, the room fell silent. When he revealed the system spends over $1 billion per year, the participants were floored.
“I had no idea that we spent even close to that much,” remembered Dr. Prabhu.
This realization was further hammered home during a finance-focused exercise in which the program participants brainstormed ways to expand a department by a certain number of physicians.
The standard of care in physician well-being recognition
Institutions in this article have been honored by the Joy in Medicine® Health System Recognition Program.
“We soon recognized that you have to consider way more than just the salaries to hire physicians. You also have to factor in the costs for the facilities, ancillary staff and so many other things,” he shared. “Being in leadership you realize all of the different costs associated with running a health system.”
Today, Dr. Prabhu is paying forward what he’s learned, helping other physicians get a solid understanding of health care finance early in their careers. He developed a practice management program for residents that introduces them to health care finances to allow them to recognize how it affects them and the organization as a whole.
That kind of behind-the-scenes insight also helped participants understand that there is often more than meets the eye, even when addressing seemingly simple issues.
“A lot of times you want things done right away, but we learned the backstory of all the steps leaders go through to implement changes. People don't always understand that,” said Devern.
Putting lessons into action
The program participants also put their learnings into action through the program’s capstone project. Through their individual capstone projects, participants spearhead organizational and operational initiatives focused on improving patient care and hospital operations.
Dr. Prabhu’s capstone project focused on improving communication between primary physicians and hospital consultants. The goal for the project was to reduce patients’ length of stay and, ultimately, lower hospitalization costs.
“Although it was a simple concept, the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to implement this type of concept was fun to work on, and it’s still an ongoing project,” he said. “Even though the program ended several months ago, Dr. Andrea DeSimone and I are still actively working on it and implementing changes because of it, which is awesome.”
Today, Dr. Prabhu and his fellow leadership program participants continue putting the lessons they learned and the confidence they gained into their everyday work—and their future aspirations at Bayhealth.
“A program like this really opens up a lot of opportunity for people to get involved in different aspects of our system,” said Dr. Prabhu.
