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...
The day of the medical staff strategic planning retreat for Better Times Hospital has arrived. The retreat is a direct result of the change management process initiated by Joe, the medical staff president, based on the eight-step process outlined by John Kotter in his book...
If you took on a new job, you’d expect your employer to tell you what your duties entailed, what time to show up, and how “good performance” is defined within your role. For physicians, that doesn’t always happen. They often arrive on their first day at a hospital with no rules or expectations...
As anyone who works in an ED knows, long wait times are not an ED-specific issue. Most of the time, long wait times in the ED aren't due to the numbers of patients being seen in the ED, but rather to the patients who have been admitted to the hospital through the ED and are waiting for a bed to...
It makes perfect sense-if hospitals standardize their clinical operations through accreditation standards, they will automatically improve their bottom line by eliminating waste and unnecessary costs. The right hand works with the left. It sounds easy in theory, but it is often...
In an effort to cut $33 million from its budget, Washington state has recently passed a law that limits Medicaid patients to three non-emergent ED visits per year. It will not cover visits beyond the initial three, even if the visit constitutes a true emergency. To determine...
