The rising complexity of the healthcare COO role

Today’s healthcare environment is driving a rise in the COO role’s complexity, according to a recent report from executive search firm WittKieffer.

The healthcare COO role — which is critical for ensuring efficient operations yet often difficult to clearly define — is evolving in response to industrywide trends.

Insights from WittKieffer’s report, “Decoding the Healthcare COO Role,” are based on semi-structured interviews with healthcare COOs and CEOs, surveys of leaders in Vizient’s COO network and a proprietary data analysis of industry COO career paths and job descriptions.

Here are six things to know from the report:

1. Eighty percent of COOs said their responsibilities have increased significantly in the past three years, according to WittKieffer. More than 63% of surveyed COOs reported an increase in the number of direct reports.

2. Most of this expansion has occurred in collaboration with a broader range of leaders, identifying growth or revenue opportunities, talent-related responsibilities and community engagement.

3. Many COOs oversee five to 10 functions, most commonly including pharmacy, imaging, laboratory and support services. Between 50% and 79% of COOs are responsible for ambulatory services and nursing.

4. The report outlines five key challenges COOs face today, especially related to role clarity and leadership dynamics. These are managing financial pressures; balancing time across operations, strategy and people; increasing capacity and throughput; aligning operations with strategy; and overseeing complex environments.

5. For future success, COOs will need to thrive in key areas such as leveraging technology and artificial intelligence, maintaining clarity amid chaos, identifying cross-industry patterns and guiding across distributed environments, according to the report.

6. For COO-CEO partnerships to thrive, the report recommends establishing job clarity, expanding the COO’s impact beyond operations to system integration and supporting development of enterprise-level perspective.

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