Building a Physician Culture for Healthcare Transformation: A Hospitalʼs Leadership Challenge

Abstract

Engaging and integrating physicians has become the veritable "brass ring" for many hospital systems: many attempts and few actual wins. This is especially true in California's managed care environment and for public entities such as Palomar Health in Escondido, California. Our commitment to engage and integrate physicians continues to be a vital element of a larger cultural shift toward delivery of care that puts the patients' needs first. A key determinant of success has been the ability to align a diverse medical staff culture with administrative priorities. This alignment involves a carefully executed strategy and a structure to build a collective identity among diverse players. Palomar Health is in the third year of the journey. Some of the critical milestones have been the implementation of a physician leadership development process, creation of a physician onboarding process to codify the desired physician culture, delineation of roles and expectations for physician leadership, and formalization of dyad and triad partnerships between physicians and their clinical and administrative partners.