7. Prioritizing and Decision-Making

Meeting the demand to improve population health and quality of individual care while lowering overall healthcare costs has created unprecedented challenges for healthcare educators, practitioners, and executive leadership to navigate. Leaders embracing this challenge must prioritize creativity and innovation while employing decision-making processes that are collaborative and agile enough to contend with resistance from those clinging to vanishing models of healthcare and full-throttle innovation currently underway. Without intention, prioritizing and decision-making became guided by the urgency of today’s crisis. Formal and informal processes for prioritizing and decision-making are needed to counterbalance default approaches, which lead heavily toward the status quo. This chapter offers practical approaches for setting and honoring priorities that envision a future that doesn’t yet exist and guidelines for charting a decision-making course to get there. Ultimately, prioritizing and decision-making require the alchemist’s audacity, the scientist’s relentless insistence on evidence, and a farmer’s consistent practicality.