Physician employment has been a growing trend for years, yet physicians, hospitals, and health systems alike are still ironing out wrinkles in employment agreements.
Patients are becoming increasingly involved in their own care, often doing Internet research and coming to office visits or the hospital armed with questions and their own ideas about what constitutes appropriate care. It's a good thing.
The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) has given the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) a third grant to continue its work to improve license portability and reduce regulatory barriers to telemedicine.
Most people don't realize that hospitals are run by boards, and even for people who work in hospitals, the board is shrouded in mystery. Although it seems that one needs to know a secret handshake to gain insight into the board's inner workings, transparency is the new word on...
Change never really ends. Medical staff members, leaders, and hospital administrators at Better Times Hospital learned many valuable lessons from the medical staff governance change initiative, including the following...
Having personal conversations in the hallways and making fun of other physicians to colleagues were among the most common unprofessional behaviors identified by hospitalists in a study published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine in May. The 77 participating hospitalists...
Only about half of the states consider it unethical and illegal to self-prescribe controlled substances or to prescribe them to family members, and most states do not address self-treatment or the treatment of family members. That means it is up to individual hospitals to prevent practitioners...
In the last installment, the medical staff model change initiative at Better Times Hospital hit the wall. The guiding coalition again sought counsel from John Kotter's Leading Change. It became apparent that in addition to the long haul, a short-term win was needed. The...
The medical staff model change initiative at Better Times Hospital has hit the wall. The medical staff is in an uproar over the administration's assault on their cherished structures and processes. Department chairs grouse that the rug is being pulled out from under them. The...
At Better Times Hospital's medical staff redesign retreat, the guiding coalition emerged with a model called "3-6-9." The model calls for three key medical staff committees: the medical executive committee (MEC), credentials committee, and a single multispecialty peer review...
