Institute of Medicine & Public Health of New Jersey

New Jersey Healthcare Leadership Academy

The MSNJ Foundation will continue the New Jersey Healthcare Executive Leadership Academy. This project is the product of a unique collaboration of partner organizations representing physicians, hospitals, and health insurers. The Medical Society of New Jersey, The New Jersey Hospital Association and the New Jersey Association of Health Plans began discussions in 2012 to improve the delivery of healthcare in New Jersey. The executive leadership of each organization met several times over the course of a few months to examine better ways of improving healthcare in New Jersey through a collaborative approach. The discussion generated several potential project ideas – with doing “something” to build physician leadership – ranked at the top of the list.

From hospital, health plan and physicians perspectives it was clear that developing physician leadership was a critical underlying piece necessary to address the myriad of health care problems facing our state. New Jersey’s pernicious healthcare problems, such as the high cost end of life care, cannot be solved without strong physician leadership. From this beginning each organization created “organizational buy in” by passing board resolutions supporting the development of a physician leadership academy with the partner organizations. Over the next 18 months the collaborative was convened to begin a process to establish a physician leadership academy. Each organization appointed 3-5 members of its board to help guide the project. This group decided to have the respective foundations of the MSNJ and the NJHA co-lead the planning and implementation of a leadership academy. While the doctors and hospitals are leading this initiative, The New Jersey Association of Health Plans endorses the leadership academy to its members and will encourage individual plans to support physicians wishing to enroll in the academy through scholarships or stipends.

The program will invite not only physicians from each of the co-sponsoring organizations, but also hospital and health plans executives. This concept will be a unique venture that has not been done elsewhere nationwide. The goal is to build stronger leadership among physicians and executives from hospitals, post-acute providers and health plan executives. Through the academy, they will be taught leadership skills through our academic partner, Seton Hall University, and those leadership skills will be taught against a pressing healthcare issue in NJ (i.e., Improving Care at the End-of-Life).