Stronger Together: Leveraging Triad Leadership for Healthcare’s Biggest Challenges

Healthcare leaders have never been under more pressure. In the current environment of ongoing uncertainty, leaders are tasked with meeting increased demand for care while improving margins, despite a worsening workforce shortage, declining reimbursements, and shifting healthcare policy. The many challenges are increasingly connected, and yet organizational structures often prevent leaders from working together, casting each into a silo in which little collaboration or consideration of other departments occurs.

Enter the triad leadership model — a governance structure that brings together administrative, physician, and nursing leaders as equal partners in organizational decision-making. Born from the recognition that healthcare’s complex problems benefit from blended expertise, the triad model has spread across the industry over the past decade. But does the approach actually deliver on its promise? And more importantly, can triad leadership effectively address the existential threats facing healthcare today?

Jackson Physician Search and Kirby Bates Associates conducted an industry pulse survey to answer these very questions. With comprehensive responses from 179 healthcare c-suite executives, the study captures current perceptions of how triad and dyad leadership models are performing in the field.