Chief Financial Executive

Dissertation Title

The contribution of interim executives to the healthcare industry.

Dissertation Abstract

This is the first research-based study of interim executive services in the US healthcare industry. It opens a new area of inquiry for academic investigation of the role of interim executive services in the healthcare industry. The study focused on Chief Executive Officer and Board of Directors leadership in acute care hospitals of all sizes across the United States. The research survey resulted in 443 responses to over seventy-five questions addressing interim executive services from the perspective of healthcare decision makers. Ninety five percent of the respondents were CEOs and the remainder were board members, primarily chairpersons.

The research is focused on acute care providers and revealed that over fifty percent of the respondents had engaged an interim executive. Over thirty three percent of the respondents had engaged two or more interims. While the most commonly engaged interim executive is a CFO, there is not a significant difference between the proportion of CEOs and CFOs engaged as interim executives. Non-critical access hospitals are three times as likely to use interim services as a critical access hospital although the proportion of critical access hospitals that have used interim services is roughly half and half.

Decision makers see value in their interim executive engagements with fifty one percent reporting value in excess of the cost of the consultancy. Approximately 95% of the respondents stated that the impact of the interim engagement was either favorable (16.8%) or very favorable (78.6%). Over thirty percent reported that their organization was much better off than it would have been without the assistance of the interim executive although only 35% indicated a likelihood of engaging an interim executive in the future.