“Step Up” evokes the passion that healthcare finance leaders need to solve our system’s formidable challenges, along with the characteristics that make passion a positive force for change: a willingness to engage and empower people across traditional boundaries, a sense of urgency, and an eagerness to accept accountability.

The most important trait of any true leader is passion. Passion implies dedication, commitment, energy, empathy, and action. Leaders with passion are those who change the world.

Passionate leaders engage and empower important stakeholders to deal with issues and produce workable solutions. This engagement involves getting out of silos and reaching out to those whose views, backgrounds, and roles are different from one’s own. Engagement requires an open dialog to ensure views are expressed and considered, especially when challenges are complex or contentious. In many cases, the process of gaining perspectives is as important as the results.

For groups to successfully bring positive change, they must share a sense of urgency—an understanding that improving our healthcare system is a top priority for our organizations, patients, communities, and nation.

Such improvement efforts must culminate in an eagerness to take ownership of the challenges and their solutions—to embrace accountability.

Examples of stepping up in today’s environment include:

• Healthcare finance leaders working with clinical leaders to improve quality and safety, and to reduce cost
• Providers working with payers to develop common goals and approaches to reduce administrative costs, rationalize payments, and ensure appropriate health services are provided at the right time, in the right place, at the right cost
• Healthcare leaders (providers and payers), employers, and government working with their communities to improve community health status
• Healthcare stakeholders working with government to ensure coverage and achievement of national health goals

Today’s economic and financial environment has created a burning platform that can consume the organization or provide the impetus to institute necessary changes that improve care while reducing cost. We must step up. If we have the passion necessary to own the future, create a sense of urgency, empower people to bring their talents and perspectives to bear to achieve common goals, and collaborate to gain consensus, then we can survive and thrive.