Driven by emerging market pressures, the number and size of health systems has grown rapidly across the last few years. By joining a system, hospitals expect they will significantly improve revenue, care quality, and cost management.

But many systems are unable to realize these anticipated benefits, often because the cross-facility collaboration needed to drive these benefits is difficult to achieve with legacy site-based service line management structures.

Creating the right system structure for service line management and governance can help organizations break through traditional performance barriers. But with the many options and decisions for system leaders to weigh when developing a system service line structure, the right model for your organization must ultimately be informed by the specific goals you hope to achieve with system service lines.

Download this five-step toolkit to develop goal-oriented system service lines.

DOWNLOAD THE TOOLKIT

Step 1: Define top goals for service line structure

To create an optimal system service line model, leaders must first identify the specific challenges they need the model to address. The identified challenges translate into the organization’s top goals and guide the system's creation of a new management structure. Read more

Step 2: Determine system service line responsibilities

Leaders should use the identified goals to determine the scope of responsibilities for the system service lines versus site-based service lines. Responsibilities span three categories: strategy and business development, clinical and service quality performance, and financial management. Assigning the appropriate scope of responsibilities to system and site-based leaders ensures clarity of roles and accountability. Read more

Step 3: Develop reporting relationship between system, sites of care

Next, organizations should establish the reporting structure between the service line’s system-level and site-based leaders. This decision should be based on the system’s culture, current reporting and budgeting structures, and willingness of service line stakeholders across the system to collaborate. Read more

Step 4: Identify appropriate leadership for each service line

Executives must then determine who will lead the system service line—from the service line chief executive to service line-specific patient and family advisory councils to clinical working committees—to ensure achievement of their top goals. Read more

Step 5: Determine necessity of cross-service line management

Finally, organizations should evaluate whether cross-service line management—explicitly charged with looking across system service lines to ensure decisions align with system priorities—is necessary for meeting the identified goals. Read more

Now that you've completed the steps, get additional guidance for your top goal

After determining the top goal you want your system line structure to achieve, our toolkit also includes guidance on what your answers should look like for each step, from determining leadership roles and responsibilities to the necessity of cross-service line management. The one-pagers begin on page 31 of the toolkit.