Less than robust communication and leadership skills are serious problems that have systematically plagued some segments of the healthcare industry. Combine that with a high turnover rate among qualified healthcare leaders and you have an even bigger problem.

The National Center for Healthcare Leadership (NCHL; Chicago, Illinois) has teamed up with med-tech giant GE Healthcare (Waukesha, Wisconsin) to address these problems by launching a series of leadership training seminars dubbed the Institute for Transformational Healthcare Leadership.

“The outcome that we’re looking for is [healthcare] out-performing itself,” Kelly Rakowski, managing principle for performance solutions of GE Healthcare, told Medical Device Daily. “Our goal is to really make an impact on the leadership component of the healthcare industry. It’s actually a mixture of seminars and consultant work.”

She said that the institute’s vision is to deploy a framework for achieving “transformational and sustainable” improvements in efficiency, quality, safety, and access. It will focus on individually and organizationally measured performance improvement in an attempt to empower healthcare leaders to manage change and create a culture of accountability.

The somewhat pricey endeavor — pricey, since costing up to $3,000 a person attending, though hopefully cost-effective in the long run — is targeting healthcare leaders, particularly mid-level directors and managers, who are responsible for managing clinical and operational teams.

The seminars are slated to start next month at GE Healthcare’s Waukesha headquarters and have been a focus of both companies for about a year now, Rakowski said.

The driving factor for both companies getting together on the same page for this initiative stems from the high turnover rate of healthcare CEOs, according to Rakowski.

“CEOs leave in two-and-a-half years of employment, and there are very few succession plans,” she said. “Fifteen years ago there was more longevity — but you have to take into consideration that the healthcare industry was a totally different place back then. Back then CEOs of hospitals were community leaders — now there are more demands.

“There’s financial planning that they’re accountable for, there’s disaster planning, [and] they have to meet numbers each month on their budgets — a lot of these guys are saying, I can’t deal with this anymore.” (And Rakowski would certainly include women in that category as well.)

GE believes that the seminar will help develop stronger healthcare leaders and smooth the natural transition of leadership.

As an extra incentive, GE Healthcare is authorized to award 21 hours of category II continuing medical education credit for the program toward advancement and recertification in the American College of Healthcare Executives (Chicago).

Another component of the institute includes the opportunity for healthcare companies to receive consultation from GE and NCHL professionals. Participants will have access to healthcare and industry thought leaders able to provide management expertise in transformation.

“The companies can also have us do an assessment,” Rakowski said, “so we can help them pinpoint those areas that need adjustment.”

Two previous offerings from the companies helped serve as the catalyst for the institute.

“It’s a very symbiotic relationship between the two companies,” Rakowski said. “We work very well together.”

NCHL is a not-for-profit organization that is an industry catalyst to assure the availability of accountable healthcare leadership. NCHL says it will continue what it calls its “nationally recognized” Leadership Excellence Program and expand its research demonstration projects and work with universities and others on graduate health management education, recruitment to careers in health management and diversity leadership.

GE Healthcare is a $17 billion unit of General Electric (Fairfield, Connecticut). The company’s most recent product release was the launch of its mobile Senographe Essential, a platform to scan women for breast cancer (MDD, Aug. 27, 2007).