Richard Bohmer MBChB MPH
Richard Bohmer is a New Zealand-trained doctor and a management academic. He has practiced as a hospital and primary physician and as a medical administrator. He was on the faculty of Harvard Business School for 18 years where he established graduate and executive programs in health care management and co-founded the MD-MBA. He has published extensively in the medical and management literatures and is the author of Designing Care: Aligning the Nature and Management of Health Care (HBS Press, 2009).
Dr. Bohmer currently resides in the United Kingdom where he is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Nuffield Trust after four years as an International Visiting Fellow at the King's Fund. He works independently with numerous hospitals and health authorities around the world to help them establish clinical leadership and management models and to improve their performance. In 2014 he founded Clinical Leadership Resources, and he has been named one of the United Kingdom’s Top 100 Most Influential Clinical Leaders for the last three years.
Selected Publications
Delivering Value-Based Healthcare
- Bohmer, R.M., 2016. The hard work of health care transformation. N Engl J Med, 375(8), pp.709-11.
- Bohmer, R.M., 2011. The four habits of high-value health care organizations. N Engl J Med, 365(22), pp.2045-2047.
- Bohmer, R.M. and Lee, T.H., 2009. The shifting mission of health care delivery organizations. N Engl J Med, 361(6), p.551.
Clinical Leadership
- Bohmer, R., Ives Erickson, J., Meyer, G., Blanchfield, B., Mountford, J., Vanderwagen, W. and Boland, G., 2021. 10 Leadership Lessons From Covid Field Hospitals. Harvard Business Review.
- Bohmer, R.M., 2013. Leading clinicians and clinicians leading. The New England journal of medicine, 368(16), p.1468.
- Bohmer, R., 2012. The instrumental value of medical leadership. Engaging doctors in improving services. London: The Kings Fund.
Learning Systems
Responding to Covid-19
- Meyer Gregg, S., Blanchfield Bonnie, B., Bohmer Richard, M.J. and Craig, V., 2020. Alternative Care Sites for the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Early US and UK Experience. NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery.
- Bohmer, R.M., Pisano, G.P., Sadun, R. and Tsai, T.C., 2020. How Hospitals Can Manage Supply Chain Shortages as Demand Surges.
- Cheung, C.R., Finnemore, A., Handforth, J., Bohmer, R., Christiansen, N. and Miller, O., 2020. Developing new models of care at speed: learning from healthcare redesign for children with COVID-related multisystem inflammation. Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Around the world nations are working to reform their health care systems to address persistent problems in quality and burgeoning cost. Reform of the delivery sector has been central to these efforts as care delivery organizations are, after all, the final common pathway through which policy changes are translated into better patient care.
Several common themes have emerged among institutions that have succeeded in transforming themselves into high performing health delivery organizations; those that achieve better results and deliver higher value than their peers. Of these, three are particularly notable; the management of these organizations is clinically oriented, clinician leadership deep within the organization plays a prominent part in both day-to-day operations and long-term performance improvement, and the organization has a set of structures and processes in place to support an ongoing habit of system redesign.
Clinical Leadership Resources helps health care delivery organizations implement the Clinical Management and Care Redesign Program. This program deploys an approach to the clinical management of health care delivery organizations and a systematic method of transforming them to improve their performance. The program provides
- Forum for identifying & recruiting internal clinical leaders
- Clinically focused leadership training for managers & clinicians
- Opportunity to practice leadership skills
- Opportunity for clinicians & managers to work together
- Structured clinical process and care model redesign process
- Process for performance metric identification and reporting
- Focus for planning and implementing current and future supporting infrastructure