Have you developed your goals for the New Year?

“Vision without action is a daydream,

                     Action without vision is a nightmare.”

                                                                -Japanese proverb

How do you know if you’ve reached your destination, if you never knew where you were going? In today’s busy times where there are multiple demands on a physician’s time, we sometimes find ourselves going through the motions – seeing patients, going to meetings, etc. The same things we did yesterday, we are doing today, and will do tomorrow. Many times we don’t sit down to analyze where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are going, either personally or as an organized medical staff.

Because it is the end of the year, now is the time to sit down and think about these things for your organized medical staff. This is the time of year when many medical staffs elect new officers, thus making it a good time to promote new ideas or build on old (but good) ideas. Other medical staff leaders are at the midway point of their terms. For them, it is a good time to assess what previously set goals they have established and to make any alterations in the game plan to get the job done.

Most physicians spend all of their effort becoming the best physicians they can be by focusing on patient care. They do not leave any time for administrative duties, such as medical staff leadership. However, taking on a leadership role is another step toward becoming a better physician by directing your future and the future of your medical staff.

Many medical staff leaders have undergone training for organized medical staff duties and responsibilities. They learn the best practices in credentialing, peer review, and other necessary areas and apply those best practices to do their jobs well. In every medical staff, there are a few leaders that are visionary. They develop a vision for what healthcare should look like in the future. They see how the organized medical staff can contribute to those goals as well as improve the organized medical staff itself.

What are your goals for the next one to two years? Do you have specific quality goals that you would like to achieve? Do you have specific recruiting needs for the community with which the organized medical staff can assist? Do you have specific goals on physician-hospital relationships that you would like to see approved? Do you have goals of restructuring the medical staff to decrease bureaucracy and increase engagement?

Whatever the goals, work on them to have positive accomplishments or you will end up with only a daydream of what could have been. Without goals to direct us, our future could become even worse: a true nightmare.

Mary J. Hoppa, MD, MBA, CMSL, is a senior consultant with The Greeley Company, a division of HCPro, Inc. in Danvers, MA.