Tim Coan is the CEO of Centennial, Colo.-based ALN Medical Management.
Mr. Coan will serve on the panels "What Gives ASCs a Competitive Edge" and "Walmart, Amazon and Google in Healthcare: Good or Bad for ASCs?" at Becker’s ASC Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker’s is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference on Oct. 27-29 in Chicago.
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Question: What is the smartest thing you've done in the last year to set your organization up for success?
Tim Coan: We’ve been building and investing in our second level of leadership — those reporting to members of our executive team — very intentionally for the past three to four years. We made some changes in who was on that team and got some people moved into the right roles for them and the organization. They have proven they are ready for more, and over the past year our executives are stepping back and giving several of them space to play a bigger role. The results have been fantastic
Q: What are you most excited about right now and what makes you nervous?
TC: The migration to value-based care is finally starting to get some traction. Our clients are independent physician practices, mostly from surgical and procedural specialties. They are not part of health systems, not primary care groups moving to take global risk. As such, they’ve mostly been on the sidelines of value-based care. It is now starting to come to them — in certain markets and for certain specialties. Like any disruption, it will damage those who are behind the curve and fighting it, but for some the new dynamic — how they get patients, who is really paying their claims, new aligned financial arrangements — will be a huge win.
Q: How are you thinking about growth over the next 12 months?
TC: A major growth driver for us is the continuing consolidation of physician practices outside the hospital-based health system, be it driven by outside equity or not. Our solution and services are built for these growing and complicated practices. So we are particularly tuned into these opportunities.
Q: What will healthcare executives and leaders need to be effective leaders for the next five years?
With our focus on the independent physician market, which is consolidating quickly into larger entities, the executives we serve are having to help physicians migrate from hands-on owners of their own practice to shareholders — who may have equity partners as a controlling shareholder — who work through a new governance model. At the same time, they are building scalable operations and management organizations that are a lot more sophisticated than what independent physician practices had historically. That is a lot of DNA, culture, and mindset change to help others navigate.
Q: What is your strategy for recruiting and retaining great teams?
TC: Recruiting and retaining are tough right now, for sure. We have had great historical success attracting talent based on our culture. Now, we have moved the vast majority of employees to a 100% remote work model. While that allows us to open the markets from which we hire, that model poses challenges to building culture. Our leaders and managers, with the support of our employee engagement team, have done a great job experimenting, innovating and learning new ways to build connections and transmit our values and work expectations in a remote world.