Meeting Challenges Today and in the Future

With today’s challenges in healthcare, the shifting landscape of the industry, and the unpredictable fate of federal legislation, it is essential that physicians are directly involved in healthcare leadership to navigate a better path forward for the profession and the patients. As the healthcare system evolves and physician leaders face more administrative and regulatory burdens, they must build business, management, and leadership competencies.

In this issue, we gain a better understanding of the various challenges physician leaders and their colleagues face today, tomorrow, and in the future. For example, aside from a personal illness, the loss of a job creates tremendous stress that is all-consuming until your career is re-started. In this issue, a field report offers a frank discussion about managing unemployment as a physician. The author pulls from his own personal experiences of job elimination and provides sound advice on how to survive job loss due to organizational issues or economic forces beyond your control, such as mergers, acquisitions, downsizing, and outsourcing.

As we focus on our discipline as physician leaders for tomorrow, we include an important topic for the success of our colleagues: leadership training and the overall wellness of physicians. As physician leaders, unless we move from conversation to intervention on the issues of physician burnout, we will wake up tomorrow unprepared and understaffed to tackle the challenges that healthcare has created.

As health systems contemplate the strategic opportunities that will create their future, physician leaders will find much value in the discussion article that details how Medicare Advantage plans offer health systems opportunities to join high-performing networks and expand reliable revenue streams while advancing their value-based vision of better quality care at a lower cost.

As you read through this collection of articles, which we have carefully selected for this issue, I encourage you to consider their relevance to the work you are doing with your teams every day — not just for the purposes of informing your own leadership strategies, but also in terms of the ways you can help inform your colleagues, staff, and others.

As the official journal of the American Association for Physician Leaders, the Physician Leadership Journal provides a platform for you to share your research with members around the world. Now is the time to use this platform, particularly as physician leaders, to help inspire change in healthcare and to improve the way we deliver care to the patients, families, and communities we serve.

We welcome your papers for publication. To request author guidelines or to submit a completed manuscript, email editor@physicianleaders.org.