AHA's Richard Umbdenstock wins ACHE Gold Medal award

Sister Carol Keehan, CEO of the Catholic Health Association, recalls how hard American Hospital Association CEO Richard Umbdenstock worked behind the scenes to develop a unified hospital industry response in support of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform effort.

In the many hospital industry meetings she attended with him, Keehan said Umbdenstock had a “positive and mature way of conducting business. … He knows what it means to families to have a health insurance product that will be there when you need it.”

Last year, Umbdenstock, 64, announced he would retire from his post as head of the AHA at the end of 2015. The American College of Healthcare Executives thinks his influence has gone well beyond the membership of the organization that he has led since 2007. Next month, it will honor him with the ACHE Gold Medal Award, which “recognizes individuals who go beyond the confines of their own organization to continually contribute to the improvement of healthcare services and community health.”

Kevin Lofton, his fellow Gold Medal recipient who is CEO of Catholic Health Initiatives, told Modern Healthcare last year that Umbdenstock and Keehan took heat for supporting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but showed “fortitude and resolve” for taking “the greater good into account.”

Umbdenstock said the AHA has moved its focus from Washington to the states as it tries to persuade elected officials in states to expand Medicaid coverage to lower-income adults. But it also must remain vigilant about any more cuts to Medicare and Medicaid hospital spending, he said, adding that hospitals' payments have been reduced $121 billion since 2010.

“It's time to get that right balance between the need for coverage and shared responsibility for paying for coverage,” Umbdenstock said. “Hospitals have done a lot. It's time to match up those cuts with coverage—or delay future cuts until that coverage comes up.”

Umbdenstock testified before Congress last month about the AHA's support for repealing the Medicare sustainable growth-rate physician-payment formula. But he also told Congress that as more doctors become employed by hospitals, it would be a foolish proposition to try to fix Medicare's physician-payment problem by taking more money away from hospitals.

“To reduce hospital payments to prevent physician cuts is, therefore, counterproductive and would adversely impact the very physicians Congress is trying to help,” Umbdenstock said at a Jan. 22 hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Health

Subcommittee. “When there is greater physician-hospital alignment, providers are able to more aggressively redesign the way health services are delivered to achieve efficient and high-quality patient outcomes.”

Doctors were facing a 5% SGR-driven Medicare pay cut when Umbdenstock became AHA CEO eight years ago. If Congress doesn't act by March 31, physicians are looking at a 21.2% SGR-driven decrease. “These things don't improve with age,” Umbdenstock said.

He takes pride in his member hospitals' advances in patient safety and quality improvement over the past eight years. Umbdenstock points to reductions in catheter-associated urinary-tract infections, blood-stream infections and elective obstetric deliveries before 39 weeks as positive responses to national measurement of hospital performance.

“I'm really proud of the work they've done and the progress they made,” Umbdenstock said. “There's a long way to go, but we're learning what works and that's been most gratifying.”

With his AHA career coming to a close, Umbdenstock said he has no retirement plans other than to walk his grandchildren to school.

Umbdenstock started out preparing for a career in hospital administration after he finished graduate school in 1974, but no one was hiring. That's when he landed in the world of hospital associations.

“The one job offer I got was with the Hospital Association of New York State organizing seminars for membership,” he said. He recalls that George Allen, who was then HANYS president, recommended him for a job as an assistant to the AHA's then-president, J. Alexander McMahon, a member of the Health Care Hall of Fame. “One year out of school, I was working for the president of a national organization. Those two things I couldn't predict, and it set me on a course where I ended up back at the AHA.”

Umbdenstock won't have a role in choosing his successor, and he said the AHA was smart to not have him involved. He declined to offer any advice for the AHA's next CEO other than to listen to the members.

Follow Andis Robeznieks on Twitter: @MHARobeznieks