Business Management Consultant Tips

Medical settings are complex organizations requiring expertise in health care intervention, business skills, and people management. Most leaders and managers have extensive training in medical care, and often in business. Few have training in the people side of business. It is this area that can make or break the quality of care delivered by your system.

Tom DeMaio is a consultant who focuses exclusively on the people side of your medical service provision. He has a long history of working with physicians, nurses, medical practices, and hospitals. He can help Your organization by: building the quality of your people management from your leadership to your front line staff, growing your leaders and your teams, helping with culture change or crisis management, and through building an esprit de corps among your staff to create a high performance medical center.

In providing support for your organization Dr. DeMaio would meet with you, assess your needs, and provide services tailored to your requirements. The services offered include:

• Culture and people change management
• Team building and trust enhancement
• Communication improvement
• Collaboration and mediation

• Leadership development and executive coaching
• Conflict resolution
• Crisis management

Tom DeMaio’s Approach

The hallmark of Dr. DeMaio’s approach is designing services targeted to the unique needs of his clients. Consultation is a process and not an event.  He works with you to understand and solve your problems in a teaming fashion. The goal is to get to the root causes of problems and develop systems fitting your organization so as to effect lasting change.

As an outside consultant Dr. DeMaio has an opportunity to help where your internal systems may have failed. As outside consultant brings a fresh perspective to solutions, not constrained by internal forces. Dr. DeMaio focuses on improving team performance, positive culture change, and on solving people problems. It is the building of positive process that insures the establishment of lasting performance change.

Change in the Health Care Delivery System

“Increasingly there are internal conflicts among medical staff and between hospital and medical providers.”

Changes in the health care delivery system over the past two decades are nothing less than revolutionary. Medical interventions are constantly advancing and requiring more of medical interveners. Continuing advances in quality standards, infrastructure needs, and reporting requirements make health care a very complex and dynamic field. Of course, financial and reimbursement demands are a critical and ongoing struggle. Perhaps most revolutionary are the demands on the people side of medicine.

The provision of care requires a new level of team work and cooperation. More often there are interdisciplinary teams of physicians, nurses, support staff and administrators. The new complexity of care can create an environment of role uncertainty and conflict.

• Physicians must confront business demands never contemplated when they were in training.
• The advent of new payment systems has dramatically caused difficulties, threatened income, and simultaneously imposed production standards.
• All changes have threatened to violate the fundamental provider/patient relationship.

The relationships between individuals, practices, hospitals and departments are exceedingly complex.

The relationships between physicians and hospitals have changed as well. The medical center or hospital is no longer the setting where the independent physician simply practices his or her specialty. There are a host of new arrangements between hospitals, physicians, and communities. Increasingly there are internal conflicts among medical staff and between hospital and medical providers.

Today’s patient is frequently far better informed about their conditions through consultation and internet research. The informed patient may also have higher expectations of their health care providers and healthcare institutions creating significant competitive pressures on both providers and hospitals.

Traditional decision makers such as senior physicians, department heads, and directors frequently no longer have single lines of authority. The relationships between individuals, practices, hospitals and departments are exceedingly complex. It is in this context that organizational consultants can be invaluable.