Healthcare
Today’s healthcare leaders—in health systems, academic medicine and beyond—face unprecedented shifts in how care will be delivered and financed in the future. For many, this is a time of living in two worlds—optimizing for success in a volume-based, fee-for-service environment while simultaneously preparing for how to thrive in an era of value-based, population health management and all that it entails. CFAR is committed to helping our clients make sense of and manage the transition to 21st century healthcare by building and sustaining organizations that accelerate performance in the face of continuous change. The most effective way to thrive in this environment is for leaders to clearly, confidently, and continuously align strategy, culture, structure, and leadership—and to do so in a way that allows for flexibility and adaptation.
Through our healthcare practice, CFAR aims to make healthcare better in this country. The organizations are complex. The work is hard. The stakes are high. The potential for improvement is tremendous. Partnerships are critical. High functioning teams are essential—and people matter. It’s just the kind of work that we love, and that has been central to who we are and what we have done for over 30 years.
Our consultants are deeply committed to improving health, both through our client work and through the roles that many of us serve as Fellows and volunteer leaders of the American College of Healthcare Executives. We have worked with some of the most prestigious and largest healthcare systems and academic health centers in the US. We bring a depth and sophistication to client partnerships, creating customized processes and solutions that draw on our interdisciplinary teams with expertise in organizational and interpersonal dynamics, economics, public health, ethnography, culture change, negotiation, and more. We also know that organizations must own the change they want to make. Our approach to partnering with healthcare leaders is designed to bring the best of what we do to enhance the knowledge and skill that already lives within your teams and organizations. Together, we collaborate to accelerate a path to improved performance in ways that activate your organization to own and, more importantly, implement the commitments, behaviors, structures, and plans needed to get there. 
Health Systems
For many health system and operating entity leaders and their boards, this is a time to restage and reset as the impact of COVID-19 takes its toll on the culture, strategy, care teams, and financial strength of their organizations. We help leaders adapt and align strategy and develop capacity and flexibility in the face of continuous change and multiple, unpredictable shocks to the system. Our work reimagines healthcare with patients truly at the center, applying systems thinking to assess and improve culture, build strong leadership and teams, create strategic alignment, and manage organizational and governance change to improve performance.
Academic Medicine
The intertwined missions of academic health systems—education, research, clinical care, and community engagement—create complicated challenges and represent tremendous, innovative potential. CFAR partners with leaders in academic health organizations to help them achieve their goals by strengthening culture and improving organizational effectiveness, clinical performance, governance, quality, safety, research, and training the next generation of providers.
Professional Societies, Associations, and Certifying Boards
Professional societies, associations, and certifying boards each navigate a diverse set of opportunities and challenges, as they advance their missions and support their membership. Professional societies and associations are called to address a range of issues, from shaping the professional standards of their members and protecting members’ economic interests, to supporting research and advocacy for the profession. Certifying boards play a unique role for their respective fields in protecting the public by helping to advance life-long learning and ensuring that their diplomates adhere to standards that enable high-quality, safe patient care. With these critical yet diverse goals, creating a shared strategic vision that is crisp and competitive can be challenging. CFAR has worked with many of the nation’s leading professional societies, associations, and certifying boards to create strategies that amplify impact, to strengthen governance, and to clarify decision-making roles, structures and authority in ways that improve internal and external collaboration and performance.
Research Centers and Institutes
CFAR has extensive experience working with research centers and institutes to create the conditions for successful collaboration and teamwork they need to thrive. These organizations bring passionate people together to advance a shared aim that makes an impact, while operating under an increasingly complex landscape of expectations, tightened pressures on time and resources, and the critical need for adaptation. CFAR has deep experience working with these types of organizations to foster productive internal culture, improve organizational design and effectiveness, enable greater innovation, and develop leadership effectiveness.
Healthcare Foundations
Healthcare foundations are looking to engage the passion and expertise of many stakeholders—from boards and executive leadership to administrative staff and volunteers—as they work to advance their respective missions in times of increased scrutiny and complexity. We help foundations build a capacity for strategic thinking and effective implementation by engaging them in real-time, high-stakes issues—such as leadership transition and succession, program portfolio development, organizational infrastructure improvements, research and education dilemmas, and board/staff relations.
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