Healthcare Service Line Planning and Operations

CSO 706 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

The service line trend has evolved over the past 20 years, and service lines are currently being used in both community hospitals and academic medical centers to organize care delivery for the patient, improve quality, reduce costs, and drive top line margin and market share. Despite this trend, the organization and governance of healthcare organizations are not always well aligned  with the development of service lines, and clinical operations leaders need insight in how to advance change and work towards models of care that best support the patient and organizational goals. Typical service lines may be disease-focused like cancer, heart disease, neurosciences, digestive diseases, and behavioral health; or focused on different populations like women's health, children's health, or geriatrics; or may be more procedureal or location-based including transplant, dialysis, critical care/ICU, perioperative services, or emergency medicine. A key driver for the establishment of service lines is the need for a complex set of clinical services that span ambulatory, procedural, and inpatient settings, as well as require high degrees of multi-disciplinary management and integration of clinical research. Physician alignment is necessary in all service line models and there are novel approaches to organizing physicians in service lines. Service lines are often a vehicle for program development, capital investment, and can be leveraged for philanthropy and naming gifts. Clinical operations leaders and service line leaders play a critical leadership role in the day-to-day management and strategic planning of these operations. This course will provide context of how service lines fit into the overall framework of a hospital, and will cover all aspects of service line leadership and management including governance, financial planning, accounting, quality control, operations, capital planning, business development, and patient centered care. The course will explore how service lines are developing in systems and in other countries as a preferred model of patient-centered, high quality care.