Hospital and health system boards are always looking to solve the most pressing challenges in health care. Asking the right questions and providing proper guidance can help establish plans to combat these issues. In this conversation, James Liggins, Jr., senior counsel at Warner Norcross + Judd, and vice chair of the board of directors at Bronson Healthcare, discusses his work developing a tool for board members that allows them to effectively understand and address areas of concern for their organizations.

Tom Haederle

Issues that continue to affect the entire health care field, such as cybersecurity, workforce and the lingering effects of the pandemic, are areas of vulnerability for most organizations. Their boards can help by asking the right questions and providing the guidance that helps hospitals and health systems develop effective plans to deal with these challenges. And now, boards themselves could get a little help with this important task.

Tom Haederle

Welcome to Advancing Health, a podcast from the American Hospital Association. I'm Tom Haederle with AHA Communications. Today we hear from James Liggins, an experienced board member with Bronson Healthcare in Michigan. In this podcast hosted by Nikhil Baviskar, the AHA's program manager for trustee services, Liggins describes his work on a tool board members can use to help their organizations thrive in this complex and challenging era for health care.

Nikhil Baviskar

James Liggins, Jr.

James Liggins, Jr.

And then we pretty much are southwest Michigan as our region as a nine-region area. And I am the incoming chair, and I've been there for, I've been on the board there for about eight years now. I'm also a commercial litigator by trade, so I do business-to-business kind of litigation. The firm that I work for is called Warner Norcross + Judd.

James Liggins, Jr.

And then with respect to the American Hospital Association, I am a Committee on Governance member, and I've been a member for several years now. And the incoming chair for that committee as well. And that is really one of the highlights of my career with respect to board work, because it's a different type of committee and it's the flow is a little bit different than I'm used to, but I'm really enjoying the impact that it seems like it has over the entire health care industry and hospitals in general.

Nikhil Baviskar

Appreciate that and thank you for the shout out. We love having our COG members involved with so much of what we do. Specifically, you know, referring to the AHA, I wanted to next question ask you about the AHA Next Generation Leaders Fellow. So this is a program that you are expected to develop a project. And one of the reasons we have you here today is to explain that project as it is something that seems interesting for lots of people.

James Liggins, Jr.

Well, sure. So the Next Generation Leaders Fellowship is, I think I'm a little bit of a unicorn with it because it's normally for those who are kind of up and coming executives headed towards the C-suite kind of level in operations of hospitals. But since I'm actually a board member as opposed to operationally speaking, it's been very interesting. And the focus of what I really wanted to get out of it was the operational side of the health care industry as a whole, and the project that I've decided to focus on is actually kind of near and dear to my heart as a board member, because it really kind of stemmed from some of the dynamics that we

James Liggins, Jr.

received or experience as an industry from Covid, as well as now we're seeing some of the cybersecurity issues that, not some of them, a lot of them, and even CrowdStrike that just kind of impacted the airline industry and others. It really kind of started to concern me as a board member about those areas of vulnerability with organizations that, should they fail and we not have redundancies in those fields or in those areas, we could have catastrophic kind of impact for the organizations.

James Liggins, Jr.

And so my project was focused on the board side of this. How do we develop a tool that helps the board to ask the right questions, to make sure that our organizations are addressing areas of those types of vulnerabilities? They're called single points of failure, and it really comes from the technical side or technology side with the idea that if you have an app or you have a server that potentially if that's your only non-redundant system and it fails, then you're in trouble.

James Liggins, Jr.

And so, but that's organizationally-wise it can be applied throughout every industry. And so my thought was how do we apply that to the health care industry. And particularly from the board level. How do we develop a tool. And this is really interesting, how do you develop a tool that doesn't poke too far into operations as a board, but also allows you to do your due diligence to ask and inquire for the questions that the board members should be asking.

James Liggins, Jr.

And so that's been my project, is develop that type of tool, and it's been a wonderful process. And fortunately I have a organization that was really behind the idea of trying to help me to develop it as well.

Nikhil Baviskar

That is awesome. In a word. I think it's really great that you are looking at this from a board member’s perspective, because we don't usually see that. And I think calling yourself a unicorn is helpful as well, because it shows us that the board member does have a unique perspective on all of this. So the board tool sounds amazing.

Nikhil Baviskar

Can you tell me how it would work in practice and potentially give us an example?

James Liggins, Jr.

Sure. So in practice, the way it works is what you really want to do is work with your executive team. So to develop questions that kind of are focused on things like, so a single point of failure could be a person, you know, it could be a position, maybe a position that we don't have a succession plan for, we don't have.

James Liggins, Jr.

But if we lost that person, the system could come to a halt. It could be very catastrophic for us. It could be a vendor that is a single point of produce or production or service for the organization that we don't have backups for. It could be someone or a knowledge or a skillset, that if that skillset goes away, the organization as a whole is in trouble.

James Liggins, Jr.

And so what we develop was a, so you work with your team, and the reason why you have to work with your executives is because you really want to counteract and mitigate the defense, the automatic defensiveness that people might have when you start talking about areas within their responsibility, right? That at the end of the day, may look or reflect bad on them.

James Liggins, Jr.

So you really have to work to bring them into the process right from the beginning and help them to understand that this is going to be anonymous. The goal is not to single point anyone out. The goal is to make sure that the organization as a whole is as healthy as it can be.

Nikhil Baviskar

Have you been able to test this out as of yet?

James Liggins, Jr.

So I have the survey. We are working on implementation right now. And so the goal is by fourth quarter to implement it at Bronson. Yeah. And the cool thing is I'll just be moving into the board chair role. So I'll have some legitimacy and pushing this out to the organization as a whole. Because just as a regular board member, I'm not sure I'd be able to get it pushed.

Nikhil Baviskar

Well legitimacy matters, yeah, legitimacy matters. Well, James, thank you so much for your time today. I can't wait to follow up with you and find out how this works out.

James Liggins, Jr.

And one last thing I'll say, Nikhil, is on the Committee on Governance. You know, the goal is hopefully after I've had a year of implementation to talk to our committee about it as well and just let the committee members know what we're doing, they may decide that it's something that they may have interest in as well. And our members as well.

Nikhil Baviskar

We are at the Innovation Hub at the Leadership Summit. So perfect idea. So thank you again, James, for your time and we'll talk to you later.

James Liggins, Jr.

Nikhil, I appreciate the opportunity.

Tom Haederle

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