Archive for 'Learning'
Collaborative Home
During a recent radio interview on The Bev Smith Show, two listeners called in with similar complaints:
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“I felt like a statistic when I called my doctor’s office to ask a question about a prescription he wanted me to take. I was put on hold twice, and then he told me that he didn’t have time to talk to me.”
“My son was supposed to have a DPT shot, but he had a cold. When I called the pediatrician’s Read more »
Posted: April 5th, 2009 under Learning.
Comments: none
Collaborative Handoffs
Readers wanting to stay on top of new developments and improve patient care will enjoy reading Patient Handoffs: Effectively Managing Care Transitions (Frontiers of Health Services Management 25(3). Chicago: Health Administration Press). I learned that 17.6% of Medicare hospital admissions are readmissions, that acccount for $15 billion in annual expenditures. Furthermore, 80% of these readmissions were deemed potentially preventable (p.6)
I was delighted to read that a large body of evidence supports interventions, such as a call from a Read more »
Posted: March 27th, 2009 under Learning.
Comments: 1
Collaborative Systems
A friend who is a retired COO of a Western hospital sent me the following e-mail after reading my column, A Practicing Surgeon Dissects Issues in Physician-Hospital Relations:
You are to blame for getting me to think as a hospital administrator once again- since I have really been enjoying semi-retirement! You mention the implications of the relationship that occurs between healthcare leaders and their boards. In today’s hospital setting, many hospitals are part of systems, and the CEOs report to someone at the Read more »
Posted: March 15th, 2009 under Learning.
Comments: 1
Collaborative Business
I’m sorry for being late with this post. I was on vacation in California with my wife and 82 year-old mother, whom we try to get out of the cold, snowy Buffalo weather one week each winter. The 5-hour plane ride gave me time to read Why Healthcare Matters: How Business Leaders Can Drive Transformational Change by Frank Hone.
The premise of the book is that the solution to our healthcare crisis lies in individual responsibility and expanded Read more »
Posted: February 24th, 2009 under Learning.
Comments: 7
Collaborative Compact
I enjoyed reading “Physician Compact: A Tool for Enhancing Physician Satisfaction and Improving Communication” so much that I spoke with Dr. Sanjeev Shukla, the principal author and Regional Medical Director of the Wheaton Franciscan Medical Group in Milwaukee, WI to obtain more information. The article was published in the Physician Executive Journal of Medical Management. 2009; 35(1):46-49. Dr. Shukla wrote:
We needed to improve physicians’ collaboration in achieving strategic goals of the medical group. We felt that the compact can be used Read more »
Posted: January 31st, 2009 under Learning.
Comments: none
Collaborative Budgeting
Who would have guessed that a surgeon would blog on budgeting?
My interest began when a fellow surgeon, the current Chief Operating Officer of a Midwest hospital, wrote that budgeting can make collaboration more of a nicety than a necessity (Lambert M. 2004. “Improvement and Innovation in Hospital Operations: A Key to Organizational Health.” Frontiers of Health Serrvice Management. 20(4):39-45.).
I wondered if an alternative existed to the annual sharpening of the elbows. In Collaborative Gnosticism, I summarized teachings of my Read more »
Posted: January 13th, 2009 under Learning.
Comments: none
Collaborative Gender Issues
I felt like I was at sea and hit by a 33-degree wave, as I listened to a group of women classmates group say, “Women are socialized to value relationships,” during the first day in Organizational Behavior in my MBA program.
It was as though all my past sins came back to haunt me. I never heard any of their other points as I relived episodes where nurses asked, “Dr. Cohn, can we talk about what happened in the Operating Room yesterday?” I thought that I Read more »
Posted: December 14th, 2008 under Learning.
Comments: 2
Collaborative Resilience
I am departing from my usual themes to review a program on CD entitled Make Yourself Unforgettable: The Dale Carnegie Class-Act System. I especially enjoyed the information on resilience in the second half of the program, which I had thought of as the ability to bend without breaking.
The authors defined resilience as the:
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ability to recover from and adapt successfully to adversity, problems, and setbacks
power to reinvent oneself as circumstances change
They felt that resilience is like a Read more »
Posted: November 27th, 2008 under Learning.
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International Collaboration
I am returning from Italy on a personal and professional high, which I owe to my wife and daughter, who convinced me to take my first 10-day vacation in over a decade. We began in Florence, where I was invited to speak on “Working as a Team and Communicating with Patients in Oncology,” at the behest of the Instituto Toscano Tumori (more on that experience in a moment). We then took a 45-minute train ride to Arezzo, where my daughter is Read more »
Posted: October 19th, 2008 under Learning.
Comments: none
Collaborative Reflection
I want to summarize the findings of “Road Map for Maintaining Career Satisfaction and Balance in Surgical Oncology,” (Kuerer HM et.al. 2008. Journal of the American College of Surgeons. 207(3):435-442). The insights extend well beyond surgery.
In their survey of 549 surgical oncologists, 24% reported emotional exhaustion, 15% feelings of depersonalization (decreased empathy), and 10% low personal achievement. These three domains of the Maslach burnout inventory are the antithesis of job engagement, energy, involvement, and a sense of efficacy, according to the authors. Read more »
Posted: October 12th, 2008 under Learning.
Comments: 4
