Bylaws, medical staff governance, & structure
Contact our teamMedical staff governance can become difficult to manage as regulations change, practice patterns evolve, and health systems grow.
Chartis reviews, redesigns, and aligns bylaws and rules & regulations to reflect regulatory requirements and how each organization operates, delivering practical governance that reduces administrative burden and strengthens physician engagement.
Medical staff governance challenges
Governance structures that work for one hospital or at one point in time may not work across a larger, more complex system. The friction tends to show up in four areas.
- Governance documents can lag behind the organization. Older bylaws and rules & regulations may no longer reflect how the medical staff and health system operate, creating ambiguity around roles, processes, and expectations.
- Variation creates unnecessary work. Different governance documents and processes across hospitals create inconsistent requirements, adding administrative burden and affecting physician satisfaction.
- Compliance and best practices need to work together. Governance documents must meet regulatory requirements while using available flexibility to adopt leading practices.
- Mergers and acquisitions make alignment more complex. Bringing medical staffs together requires reconciling different cultures, structures, and expectations, while giving physicians and other stakeholders a meaningful voice.
Modernize governance documents to optimize effectiveness and efficiency
Chartis brings physicians, advanced practice professionals, and legal experts together with healthcare leaders to make governance changes practical, compliant, and workable for the organization's unique needs.
- Bylaws and rules & regulations redesign: We facilitate collaborative sessions with physicians, administrators, and legal counsel to redesign bylaws and/or rules & regulations around the organization’s culture and requirements. We document the rationale for proposed changes so leaders can socialize recommendations and build support for medical staff approval.
- Bylaws and rules & regulations review: We review existing medical staff governance documents for regulatory compliance, recommend compliant language, and identify opportunities to incorporate leading practices.
- Medical staff alignment: Working with physicians, administrators, and legal counsel from multiple hospitals with independent medical staffs, we facilitate review and alignment sessions to create medical staff governance documents and structures to meet the needs of the organization and medical staffs. There are numerous approaches to alignment, including complete medical staff unification, combining multiple medical staffs under one hospital license, designing standardized documents, or creating a model set of governing documents that capture core requirements but allow for customization when possible.
We now have uniform medical staff bylaws across our five hospitals. Aligning the medical staffs of each hospital was a significant lift and I cannot thank Chartis enough for their help and expertise throughout the process. ”
Frequently asked questions
What are the benefits of standardized medical staff governance?
Standardized governance can reduce unnecessary administrative burdens, improve physician satisfaction, enhance autonomy and control through bylaws and rules & regulations, foster more productive relationships between hospital and medical staff, and mitigate potential litigation. For example, after ThedaCare unified the medical staffs of seven hospitals, it reduced medical staff governing documents by 85% and eliminated approximately 30 committees and meetings annually, giving providers more time to focus on patient care.
Why should a health system review its medical staff bylaws?
Organizational growth, M&A, regulatory changes, and evolving practice patterns can all signal that governance documents need another look. A review can identify where existing documents no longer reflect regulatory requirements or how the organization operates.
How do health systems align medical staffs after a merger?
There is no single model for medical staff alignment. The appropriate structure depends on the needs of the combined organization and its medical staffs, with physician, administrative, and legal stakeholders involved in determining how much standardization or local flexibility is appropriate.
Unifying medical staff: ThedaCare aligns seven diverse hospitals to one unified medical staff
ThedaCare set out to unify its medical staff across seven hospitals to improve quality, reduce risk, streamline governance, and minimize physician time in administrative tasks.
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