Archive for 'WaterCooler Collaboration'
A Massachusetts Surgeon Weighs in on the Meaning of Scott Brown’s Senate Victory: Post 81
Warning to readers: This post, like a previous post, Gotcha: A surgeon dissects patient-centered care, contains more rant than reason. Those who feel passionately that Congress is doing a great job dealing with the people’s healthcare should look elsewhere for confirmation of their views.
In An Interview with Stuart Altman, this distinguished healthcare economist mentioned Altman’s Law, that advocacy groups seek to preserve the status quo rather than adopt another plan that might disadvantage their interests.
January Read more »
Posted: January 24th, 2010 under WaterCooler Collaboration.
Comments: 3
Collaboration to Prevent Sabotage: Post 79
I join with thousands of others decrying the violence that took the lives of our troops at Fort Hood yesterday. My heart goes out to their friends and families. I pray that something will come of this event that will prevent a similar crisis from ever happening again.
The parallel with healthcare is what compels me to write today. Laurence Barton, who was VP for crisis management at Motorola, calls sabotage the undisclosed crime in Crisis Leadership Now: Read more »
Posted: November 6th, 2009 under WaterCooler Collaboration.
Comments: 1
Collaborative Guilds: Post 72
I don’t see why we should need to resort to degrading, immature tactics to get doctors to do what everyone knows they should do in the first place.
This comment, from a VP at a midwestern hospital during a discussion of healthy competition at a recent ACHE seminar that I taught, surprised me. He was the first to protest the strategy of using competition whenever people felt frustrated by the difficulty of herding cats, Read more »
Posted: July 18th, 2009 under WaterCooler Collaboration.
Comments: none
Collaborative Hardwiring: Post 71
For readers accustomed to weekly posts, I apologize that this summer, I will be cutting back to twice monthly because of a heavy clinical load performing locum tenens coverage in Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire, where I maintain licenses. Summer tends to be a busy time for me, as surgeons seek time away from work to be with their families. I feel grateful to add value by helping them enjoy vacations without worrying about what is happening to their patients. Read more »
Posted: July 4th, 2009 under WaterCooler Collaboration.
Comments: 2
Collaborative Disruption
I am responding to feedback from a seminar participant who asked for summaries of books relating to healthcare.
Through Executive Book Summaries to which I subscribe, I came across a provocative recently published book, The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care, by Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman, and Jason Hwang. Although I do not usually summarize books that I have not read in their entirety, the content motivated me Read more »
Posted: June 13th, 2009 under WaterCooler Collaboration.
Comments: 3
Collaborative Mother’s Day
This may be a controversial post on my favorite holiday, where we celebrate nurturing, sacrifice, and unconditional love; one day is insufficient.
I admit that in previous posts( Gotcha and Uncollaborative Insurance ) I have complained about what I felt were arbitrary regulations on physical therapy for cancer survivors like me who sustained spine injuries and back and neck pain as complications of lifesaving therapy.
Read more »
Posted: May 10th, 2009 under WaterCooler Collaboration.
Comments: none
Collaborative Passover
I apologize to my readers who feel that I have not been giving my blog the attention that it deserves. The last month has been a sprint:
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I was in Chicago last month attending the ACHE Congress, where I received the Dean Conley Award for the best article appearing in a healthcare management publication; that article, “The Tectonic Plates Are Shifting: Cultural Change vs. Mural Dyslexia” is available on my website
I attended The System Seminar on Internet marketing, where I implemented Read more »
Posted: April 28th, 2009 under WaterCooler Collaboration.
Comments: none
Uncollaborative Insurance
For those accustomed to data-driven posts, I apologize. This post is 99% personal experience. It represents my ongoing battle with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care to obtain coverage that I need at a price that I can afford.
This episode began when I received a notice dated 2/11/09 notifying me that the cost of my family coverage plan would increase from $1785.96 to $1929.68 per month, an 8% increase that would push my family’s cost to over $23,000 annually, considering the $25 copay per Read more »
Posted: February 28th, 2009 under WaterCooler Collaboration.
Comments: 10
An Interview with Stuart H. Altman
strong>Bio: Stuart H. Altman is the Sol C. Chaikin Professor of National Health Policy at Brandeis University. From 2000-2002 he was Co-Chair for the Legislative Health Care Task Force for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He is Chair of The Council on Health Care Economics and Policy, a private non-partisan group whose mission is to analyze important economic aspects of the U.S. health care system and to evaluate proposed changes in the system. He is also Chair of The Health Industry Read more »
Posted: December 10th, 2008 under WaterCooler Collaboration.
Comments: 5
Collaborative Thinking
Dr. Jerome Groopman’s recent book, How Doctors Think, applies not only to diagnosis and treatment but also to physicians’ ability to work more interdependently. He wrote that people can be true partners with physicians when they know how physicians think and what thinking errors they make.
Dr. Groopman feels that three types of thinking errors interfere with physicians’ ability to make correct assessments:
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Anchoring: making snap judgments, seizing on only one aspect of a problem and not considering multiple possibilities; a question Read more »
Posted: October 26th, 2008 under WaterCooler Collaboration.
Comments: 2




