This is the Foreword from Establishing, Managing, and Protecting Your Online Reputation: A Social Media Guide for Physicians and Medical Practices by Kevin Pho, MD, and Susan Gay (Greenbranch Publishing, 2013).
Information technology is transforming the way we teach, learn, communicate, work, play, and think. And there are few areas in which …
I was recently speaking to the clinical leaders of a mid-sized hospital, and a senior administrator posed the question, “should we require our doctors and nurses to get flu shots?” The answer, I said, is yes, and it isn’t just to prevent the flu. It’s to get into the habit of making our folks do the right thing when it comes to patient safety.
Preventing the flu is very important. In …
The debate over pay for performance in healthcare gets progressively more interesting, and confusing. And, with Medicare’s recent launch of its value-based purchasing and readmission penalty programs, the debate is no longer theoretical.
Just in the past several months, we’ve seen studies showing that pay for performance works, and others showing that it doesn’t. …
The human capacity to deny reality is one of our defining characteristics. Evolutionarily, it has often served us well, inspiring us to press onward against long odds. Without denial, the American settlers might have aborted their westward trek somewhere around Pittsburgh; Steve Jobs might thrown up his hands after the demise of the Lisa; and Martin Luther King’s famous speech might have been entitled, “I Have a Strategic Plan and …
A colleague recently sent me a remarkable video – of Professor Lawrence Weed giving Medical Grand Rounds at Emory University in 1971. It’s fun to watch for many reasons: the packed audience composed mostly of white men in white jackets and narrow ties, the grainy black and white images a nostalgic reminder of Life Before High Def.
But the real treat is …
On September 10, 1986, soon after I completed my residency in internal medicine, I “took the Boards” – the certifying examination administered by the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM). A few months later, I learned that I passed the exam, and that success, combined with an attestation by my residency program director, rendered me “board certified.” I was granted lifetime certification – my framed certificate …
I knew it would happen sooner or later, and earlier this week it finally did.
In 2003 US News & World Report pronounced my hospital, UCSF Medical Center, the 7th best in the nation. That same year, Medicare launched its Hospital Compare website. For the first time, quality measures for patients with pneumonia, heart failure, and heart attack were now instantly available on the Internet. While we performed …
Professor James Reason is the intellectual father of the patient safety field. I remember reading his book Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents in 1999 and having the same feeling that I had when I first donned eyeglasses: I saw my world anew, in sharper focus.
Reason’s “Swiss cheese” model, in particular – which holds that most errors in complex organizations are caused not so much by …
It’s been said that losing weight is much harder than kicking cigarettes or alcohol. After all, because one doesn’t need to smoke or drink, the offending substances can simply be kept out of sight (if not out of mind). Dieting, on the other hands, involves changing the way a person does something we all must do everyday.
It’s no surprise, then, that reports of problematic doctor interactions with social media are …
My hospital, UCSF Medical Center, is thriving. Our profits this year will be nearly $200 million. We’re building a sparkling clinical complex – a combined women’s, children’s, and cancer hospital – adjacent to our new downtown biomedical research campus.
We are installing a state-of-the-art computer system. US News & World Report calls us the 7th best hospital in the country. Our students, residents, and fellows have never been better.
Yet angst is in the air, borne …
Although the medical profession has been harming unlucky patients for centuries, the patient safety movement didn’t take flight until 1999, when the Institute of Medicine published its seminal report, To Err is Human. And that report would have ended up as just another doorstop if not for its estimate that 44,000-98,000 Americans each year die from medical mistakes, the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing each …
I recall with fondness many meetings in 1996-98, when the hospitalist field was still in its infancy. We had invented a new medical specialty, and our gatherings were vibrant and purposeful.
We were determined to remake the healthcare system, learn from each other’s triumphs and disasters, and chart a course that would improve the care of hospitalized patients. These were heady …
One of the central tenets of the patient safety movement is that modern medicine is a team sport. Unfortunately, its players – particularly physicians – were trained and socialized to be free-spirited individualists. We need the Celtics of the 80s; what we have is a collection of young John McEnroes.
While this theory has been generally accepted, there is less agreement regarding how to change things. When I speak about Read more…
Several years ago, I spoke at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where Michael DeBakey, the legendary heart surgeon, was master of the universe for nearly half a century.
I heard lots of DeBakey stories during my visit, but one in particular really stuck with me. “A few years back,” someone told me in a voice of hushed reverence usually reserved for descriptions of flawless beach days and single …
Well, it happened again. Recently, I was somewhere over Saskatchewan, returning from a lovely Mediterranean cruise, in that uncomfortable semi-conscious state that passes for sleep when you’re flying coach, when the airplane’s PA system rang out:
“If there’s a doctor on board, please ring your call button!”
If you’re old enough to remember the show “To Tell the Truth,” you know what happened next. In the show, four B-list celebrity …
I thought I was an oddball in college. I’ve only recently learned that I was avant garde.
Right before beginning college in 1975, I decided I wanted to be a doctor. Being the first-born son – with decent SATs – of an upwardly mobile Long Island Jewish family, I had relatively little choice in the matter. Notwithstanding this predestiny, I felt confident that medicine was a good fit for my interests …
One of the mantras of performance improvement is that caregivers and provider organizations should learn from their experiences. That’s all well and good, but how about policy-setting organizations?
Recently, in the New England Journal of Medicine, two of the Biggest Kahunas in the safety and quality worlds – the Joint Commission (TJC) and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) – announced bold new policies. To their credit, both organizations …
A couple of months ago, a Baltimore reporter called to get my take on a scandal at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Towson, an upscale suburb.
A rainmaker cardiologist there, Dr. Mark Midei, had been accused of placing more than 500 stents in patients who didn’t need them, justifying the procedures by purposely misreading cath films. In several of the cases, Midei allegedly read a 90 percent coronary stenosis when the actual …
If you’ve ever been on a diet, you know that it really helps to keep a food log. Seeing your consumption chronicled in one place is illuminating – and often explains why those love handles aren’t melting away despite two hours on the treadmill each week.
In a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, internist Rich Baron Rich Baron chronicles the work of his 5-person Philadelphia office practice …
Until about 8 years ago, inspections by the Joint Commission (TJC) were predictable and fairly silly.
Hospitals were given a couple of years’ notice of the week that “The Joint” would be visiting. Everybody scurried around preparing – waxing the floors, locking up all the medications, that sort of thing. (It always struck me as the most dangerous day to be in the hospital, since nobody could find any of the …
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