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
- Bohmer RMJ. The Hard Work of Healthcare Transformation. New England Journal of Medicine, 2016; 375(8): 709-711.
- Leading Clinicians and Clinicians Leading. New England Journal of Medicine, 2013; 368(16): 1468-1470.
- Lessons From England’s Health Care Workforce Redesign: No Quick Fixes. Health Affairs, 2013; 32(11): 2025-2031. (with Candace Imison)
- The Instrumental Value of Clinical Leadership, King's Fund, 2012
- The Four Habits of High Value Health Care, New England Journal of Medicine, 2011; 365(22): 2015-2017.
- Fixing Health Care on the Front Lines. Harvard Business Review, 2010 Apr:88(4)62-69.
- Managing The New Primary Care: The New Skills That Will Be Needed. Health Affairs, 2010; 29(5): 1010-1014
- Designing Care: Aligning the Nature and Management of Health Care, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 2009
- Care Platforms: A Basic Building Block For Care Delivery. Health Affairs, 2008; 27(5): 1336–1340 (with David M Lawrence)
- Facing Ambiguous Threats. Harvard Business Review, 2006 Nov;84(11):106-13, 157. (with Michael A. Roberto and Amy C. Edmondson)
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