MMHA 6000 Week 10 ACHE Competency Self-Review Example

Strong With People, Thin on Finance and Payer Contracts: An ACHE Competency Self-Review by a Clinic Office Manager Aiming at the Practice Administrator Seat, With a Twelve-Month Development Plan

Student Name

Walden University

MMHA 6000: Foundations of Healthcare Administration

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Strong With People, Thin on Finance and Payer Contracts: An ACHE Competency Self-Review by a Clinic Office Manager Aiming at the Practice Administrator Seat, With a Twelve-Month Development Plan

The Tool

The American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) publishes a self-assessment tool that lists the competencies healthcare executives need and asks the user to rate their own expertise on each (American College of Healthcare Executives [ACHE], 2024). The tool sorts its many items into five domains, which cover leading, professional conduct, relationships and communicating, business knowledge and skills, and an understanding of the healthcare environment. The domains come from the Healthcare Leadership Alliance model, developed by several professional associations to describe competencies common to healthcare managers across settings (Stefl, 2008). I completed the full tool with one question in mind: what stands between my current job, office manager of a primary care clinic, and the practice administrator seat I described in Week 1, which runs eight clinics in a composite medical group.

Ratings by Domain

I rated every item, then summarized each domain with a single judgment and the evidence behind it, as the table shows.

Table 1

Self-Ratings by Domain With Evidence From Work Experience

Ratings are self-reported and have not yet been checked against anyone else's view.

Self-ratings have a known weakness. People are often poor judges of their own competence, and those with the least skill in an area tend to overestimate it most (Dunning et al., 2004). My strong ratings deserve the most suspicion for that reason, and the reassessment plan below includes an outside view.

What the Strong Ratings May Hide

Looking at the items behind my two strong ratings, I found weaker spots inside them. In communication, I rated myself highly on resolving conflict and listening to patients, but lower on presenting to senior leaders and writing for a board, which I have done twice. Those are the communication skills an administrator uses most with the vice president and the hospital's executives. In professionalism, my record of compliance is solid, but I rated myself lower on items about contributing to the profession, such as mentoring others and taking part in professional association work beyond attending meetings. The domain summary hides these differences, which is a reason to read the item ratings rather than stop at the totals. Neither weak spot is a priority gap for the next twelve months, but both are noted for the second year of the plan.

Priority Gaps

Three gaps matter most for the seat I want.

Business skills come first. A practice administrator's monthly conversation with the vice president is about budget variance: why supply costs ran over plan, why a clinic's revenue per visit fell, whether to approve a new position. I cannot yet hold that conversation. In the tool's business domain I rated myself low on financial management items, including budgeting and capital planning.

Knowledge of the healthcare environment comes second. The medical group is moving several commercial contracts toward shared savings, and the administrator needs to understand how those arrangements reward or penalize the clinics. I know how a claim is billed at my front desk, but not how a contract determines what the claim pays.

Leadership of change across sites comes third. I rated myself adequate, but my one change project was in a single clinic where staff reported to me. The administrator's hardest task, as I described in Week 1, is changing physician schedules without authority over physicians. I have no experience of that.

Development Plan

Table 2

Twelve-Month Development Plan for the Three Priority Gaps

Each activity is tied to a measure that someone other than me can confirm.

Most of the plan relies on assignments rather than classes. Research on how executives develop found that challenging assignments, more than training programs, produced the lessons they valued most (McCall et al., 1988). The finance course is the exception, because I need its vocabulary before a stretch assignment in finance would teach me anything. The mentor relationship runs across all twelve months because it gives me someone outside my reporting line who can tell me when a plan is slipping and help me interpret what I learn in the assignments.

Reassessment

In twelve months I will complete the tool again and compare domain ratings. Because my own ratings may be inflated, I will also ask my supervisor and the medical director I work with in the access pilot to rate me on the leadership and business domains, using the same items. Where their ratings differ from mine by a full level, I will treat their view as the more reliable one and adjust the next year's plan. The goal at reassessment is not that every gap closes, but that the business domain moves from gap to adequate and that the leadership rating is supported by a project that physicians agreed to.

References

American College of Healthcare Executives. (2024). ACHE healthcare executive 2024 competencies assessment tool.

Dunning, D., Heath, C., & Suls, J. M. (2004). Flawed self-assessment: Implications for health, education, and the workplace. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5(3), 69-106. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2004.00018.x

McCall, M. W., Lombardo, M. M., & Morrison, A. M. (1988). The lessons of experience: How successful executives develop on the job. Lexington Books.

Stefl, M. E. (2008). Common competencies for all healthcare managers: The Healthcare Leadership Alliance model. Journal of Healthcare Management, 53(6), 360-373. https://doi.org/10.1097/00115514-200811000-00004