Greetings from Taipei! I'm wrapping up a 2-week vacation here in Taiwan, which included several visits to the world's tallest building, Taipei 101.

I won't be posting for the rest of the week as I will be stuck in an airplane for 16 hours and trying to recover from overeating, oversleeping, and the 14-hour time difference.

In the meantime, check out this week's grand rounds over at Matthew Holt's The Healthcare Blog. Instead the usual "weekly best," Matthew has solicited 2005's best - definitely check it out.

Looking forward to see how the healthcare blogosphere will continue to evolve in the new year. Thanks to Andrew Barna and Nick Jacobs for your insightful blog contributions. And thanks to all for reading, emailing, and commenting.

See you in 2006!

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And thanks to all those who worked the Christmas shift.

two new ones:
HITSphere, which is focused on healthcare IT
HealthVoices, which has an interesting "Open Medicine" vision about healthcare. See their healthcare blog list here.

two older ones:
Healthcareblogs stopped refreshing its feeds for a while, but now it is back on track.
MedLogs which categorizes the blogs nicely between physician, nurse, biz, etc.

so, which one is the best?

HealthVoices, MedLogs, and Healthcareblogs all segment the various healthcare blogs well. Nonetheless, I think that niche aggregators like HITsphere are going to pick up steam. Healthcare is simply much too broad to aggregate it all for anyone to make sense of it all. Besides, most people only care about one or two professionals/specialties. I can only read so many M.D. blogs before I feel a little out of place.

Then again, maybe all of these will be leapfrogged by more sophiscated RSS aggregation technology, like a TiVo for webfeeds?

Medgadget is now taking nominations for the 2005 Medical Weblogs of the Year. If for nothing else, head on over there and see what other blogs are being nominated - there will probably be a few more undiscovered blogs worth checking out.

My prediction: Hospital impact will be an underdog in one or two categories because this blog doesn't fit well into any of the categories. Just goes to show - there just ain't many hospital and/or hospital leadership blogs out there.

Plus, Dr. Helen was nominated also in one of my potential categories. Since her blog has 40x more readers than mine, and her husband's blog has 1,000x more readers than mine, with one link, we already know the results for that one! Plus, Dr. Helen is slightly more good-looking than yours truly.

Grand Rounds 2.09 is up at CodeBlog.

Not only has Geena done a great job adding her commentary on each post (including one from hospital impact), but this edition of grand rounds marks the start of a new era in medical/healthcare blogging. Thanks to Nick over at blogborygmi (a play on the medical term borborygmi, meaning stomach growling), Grand Rounds will be picked up by medical media giant Medscape. Click here (reg req.) for this week's (and 1st ever) Medscape article on grand rounds.

I'm pleased to announce that Nick Jacobs, CEO/President of Windber Medical Center and Windber Research Institute, will be blogging at hospital impact as a guest blogger, sharing his humorous and insightful thoughts on hospital leadership. You can also find his thoughts on his blog, Nick's blog, the first hospital CEO blog ever.

His background is quite interesting (as I posted previously). Among many other things, Nick was previously a high school music teacher, a director of a regional arts organization, executive director for two different healthcare foundations, a VP at Mercy Medical Center, and a chief communications officer for a health system.

What I especially appreciate about Nick is his ability to tell stories (something us financial types really need to learn), his right-brained way of thinking (check out tomorrow's post), and his approach toward leadership. It should not be lost that under Nick's leadership, his Medical Center has a 1% infection rate (9x lower than the national average) and was recently nominated as one of the top 50 places to work in the U.S.

For a full bio, check out his blog bio. Given his busy schedule as a hospital (and research institute) CEO, I especially thank him for his enthusiasm to blog at hospital impact from time to time.

UPDATE 10/2008: Nick also now blogs at askahospitalpresident.com

Welcome Nick!

Just in case you wanted to read hospital impact in Chinese, click here

You can translate any website to a few different languages using google's language tools - the simplified Chinese translation has just been added as a beta). I'm still waiting on the Dutch to English translation so I can read the blog of Martijn Hulst, who works on internet/intranet strategy for a large hospital in the Netherlands.

I went on a search for other healthcare bloggers who happen to blog in other languages. After looking everywhere, not surprisingly I found that non-English medical / healthcare-specific blogs are few and far between. Some had potential but have sinced been abandoned. A few interesting blogs I did find:
- This one looks like a Danish blog about living with diabetes. Unfortunately, Google doesn't have Danish-to-English translation yet.
- Dr. Chong's blog (in Chinese) discusses some health-related news items. Unfortunately, with sentences like, "the menopause woman keeping in good health four wants," we start to see pretty quickly that Google's translation tools still needs some work. Makes me wonder what exactly even the words "hospital impact" becomes in other languages.

After all, the blogosphere is still nascent - even more so for the healthcare blogosphere. But with the # of blogs doubling every 5 months, I'll have to check again soon - never know when someone in China or Iran or Germany will start blogging and become the next KevinMD or Matthew Holt.

by Andrew Barna

I am the guy that always sat at the front of the class. I wasn’t always the best student nor did I make the highest grades, but I was always engaged. In these early days of my career as a hospital administrator, I find myself again in the role of eager student. I am not the professor. I don’t have all the answers, but I have a long career in healthcare ahead of me and I am interested in how healthcare and hospitals evolve over the next few decades.

My front-row-sitting started at Baylor University, where I studied psychology (B.A.) and philosophy (M.A.). My interest in ethics, the experience of illness, and technology steered me toward bioethics. Fortuitously, it wasn’t until after I attended a hospital bioethics meeting that I realized that I wasn’t cut out for a career in bioethics. At that meeting, I saw the role of the hospital administrator and took a leap of faith. That led me to the University of Iowa for my MHA, where I discovered the complex world of hospitals and healthcare.

My current role, Director of Strategic Development for a hospital in the Bay Area of California, has given me a front row seat to an organization that shares many of the same challenges as other urban hospitals across the country. I have been blessed in this role to take on a number of projects around the hospital and to be a part of an executive team that is transforming a hospital. My hope is that my posts will encourage discussion on where hospitals and healthcare should be headed and how we can get there.

Note from Tony: look for Andrew's hospital leadership insights every Wednesday here on Hospital Impact (and every Tuesday at Healthcare Tomorrow). Email Andrew at andrew[at]hospitalimpact[dot]org

UPDATE 12/2005: Andrew has moved on to the next chapter in his healthcare career.

That's right - hospital impact now has another blogger - Andrew Barna. I'll let him introduce himself later this week, but I will tell you that I've enjoyed speaking with him and reading his thoughtful hospital blog, Healthcare Tomorrow. Look for his out-of-the-box insights on hospital leadership regularly on Wednesdays (and occasionally during the week) right here on Hospital Impact. Welcome Andrew!

GrandRounds is up at KidneyNotes. A couple of my favorite links:
- The best rapping nurse I've ever seen and I will ever see. This guy from UAB is hilarious. "we are ER nurses, medications we disperses..." "we treat every patient, from the womb to the tomb" "room 3 has got the flu, room 4 can't poo poo, room 5 is just cuckoo." What would you do if you were in this hospital and he was taking care of you?
- CodeBlog tells of ICU Nurses who dress up the babies on the unit for Halloween.
- GruntDoc grunting about the overhead "code blue" calls.

Greetings from the Windy City! My name is Tony Chen, I started hospital impact one fateful evening in March 2005. I work at Healthcare Financial Management Association as the Director of Product Innovation. In this role, I'm responsible for developing and bringing new products and services to hospital executives. Thus, I am constantly thinking about the business side of hospitals, especially the financial management aspects.

Given my business background, I am also very interested in all aspects of hospital management / leadership and am curious to find leadership insights and strategies from other industries. I believe that hospitals lag behind many other industries in various respects, but most importantly in the area of business leadership. Still, I believe that hospitals can be the best run organizations on the face of the planet.

Before HFMA, I was in business school at the Kellogg School of Management, where I majored in non-profit management, marketing, and finance. I also worked part-time as a healthcare equity research associate for an investment bank and was an independent healthcare management consultant. Prior to Kellogg, I worked several years at Merck as a Project Leader and Management Analyst. Back in the day, I was a Chemical Engineering major at Cornell University.

Obligatory Disclaimer: the views and opinions expressed on this blog most definitely do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer, my employer's members, my friends, my mom, my goldfish, or anybody else besides me. Hospital Impact is not affiliated with HFMA, ACHE, or any other four-letter acronym and is purely a personal endeavor. I may refer to HFMA resources from time to time, but only when I believe it benefits hospital impact readers. [add your favorite legalese here]

Drop me an email at tony[at]hospitalimpact[dot]org. Hope you stay awhile!

Check out my very first post here. Wow, I was such a young, misty-eyed blogger back then!

It was very flattering to be considered in the same group as Shrinkette, MedPundit, and KevinMD - all 4 of our blogs were mentioned by the MSSPNexus Blog as "big dogs." Hospital Impact apparently is worth $15,000 or so. Find out how much your blog is worth here.

Using the knowledge that AOL paid between $25 - 40MM for Weblogs, Inc, we have our first benchmark of how much a blog is worth to traditional media companies. True - Weblogs, Inc is more than just a bunch of linked blogs - it's also an infrastructure as well as a brand. AOL ended up paying $560 - $900 per link source (using Technorati). That's obviously not gonna hold for us small-time niche bloggers, but it is the 1st data point (of hopefully many to come) of how much blogs are worth.

Also, check out this self-reported database of # of visitors & monthly Adsense revenue. This guy from Malaysia makes $6,000/year from his blog.

UPDATE: by the way, has anyone else seen their traffic increase dramatically since google launched their blogsearch tool?

That's right. A new study from Ball State University has come out that shows that we in America spend an average on 9 hours A DAY consuming various forms of media - internet, TV, radio, magazines. This constant barrage of information makes me wonder (like I have in the past), when do we have time to think?

This also makes me wonder about this blog. Is this blog helping to filter the noise or am I really just adding to the noise?

I have to admit that my entries recently haven't been as thoughtful as I would hope. Why is it that we bloggers aim to post something daily? If we have nothing good to say, shouldn't we just keep quiet? Isn't one real good insight better than 10 regurgitated pieces of news? On the other hand, the daily posting enforces a certain personal discipline to "think" about something fresh and new everyday.

One other observation about blogging on hospitalimpact: I get the most comments about medical stuff or healthcare industry stuff. In other words, it seems like the majority of hospitalimpact readers aren't the people that it's aimed at: hospital administrative folks. I'm beginning to theorize that hospital admin just don't read blogs very much, while industry and medical people do. Is this a demographic thing (are hospital admin older?)? Is this a technology thing (are hospital admin less tech savvy somehow?)? Or maybe it's just because of sheer numbers?

Why is it that there are scores, if not hundreds, of doctor blogs, while there are only a handful (maybe less than that!) hospital admin blogs? Then again, patient stories will always be more interesting than revenue cycle stories.

Wow - it's hard to believe that hospital impact has been up for 5 months now!

Here's what others having been saying about it:

"Great blog...links are terrific resource" - Carol Kovac, GM, IBM Life Sciences

"An interesting new blog" with a mysterious origin - Matthew Holt, The Healthcare Blog

"A great little blog...you can certainly do much worse than hospital impact...staying up to date on great healthcare news" - Cincinnati Healthcare News blog

"His personal category is perceptive and worthy of note." - Health Care Blog Law

"Refreshing to see such a well thought out approach to delivering information that hospital administrators can use to improve the business side of healthcare delivery." - from a Healthcare Facilities Services Vendor reader in Philadephia

"A fantastic site and the information has been tremendous " - Director of Patient Care Services, CA

"About time somebody takes on the voice of hospital business" - Healthcare PR Consultant in PA

Please! suggestions, comments, ideas, questions, lashings, flattery, and prayer requests welcome! tony[at]hospitalimpact.org

Wow, I must be really posting some really interested entries.

Someone did an altavista video search on "you are the one- aha." The only search result was hospital impact.

Here are some of my all-time favorites searches that ended with someone visiting hospitalimpact.org:
- people fighting
- brother and sister
- one day in your life
- for you
- forum on eye bag surgery in bangkok bumrungrad hospital
- basic learn accordian
- 166
- energetic positive people
- goldfish swallowing (twice)
- music appreciation flowchart duane day

And of course, since I just posted this entry with those key words, these poor people may end up on my blog again.

As you can see, I've been adding some new blog "skins", so you can read hospital impact in various designs. Just scroll down to skins (on the left sidebar) and select your design. (my new favorite is crystalglass)

While we're on the topic of blogs, here are two good articles I ran into recently:
- A blog is born every second: some good stats on blogging today. Only 13% of bloggers update weekly.
- Don't bore me with your blog: some good advice for keeping your blog fresh and interesting.

Outside the clinic we worked at in Cap Haitien

Well, I got back from Haiti this past Sunday. All in all, it was an eye-opening and amazing experience. Later this week, I'm hoping to start posting again and to reacquaint myself with "normal" life again. Honestly, after the experience I've had, I'm also thinking through what aspects of my life ought not return to "normal."

In the meantime, I found this hospital waiting room story very touching. Sometimes, little expressions of care can go a long way.

Well, as I mentioned previously, I'm off to Haiti today and will be back June 5th.

I'm excited
A year of preparation has finally culminated to this day, when we get on a plane to Miami and then a puddle-jumper to Cap Haitien. We've been learning Creole as best as we can. As part of the medical team, maybe the most important phrase we learned: "Se pa fom mwen" (I didn't to it on purpose).

I'm a bit anxious
Although I've been to many different countries, I think Haiti will be the poorest and least politically stable country of them all. Especially with almost-daily news about riots, prison breaks, U.N. peacekeeping politics, I can't help but be a little concerned for my own health/safety and the safety of my team. Nonetheless, as hokey as it might sound, we have felt led to go every step of the way. Plus, most of the instability is in Haiti's capital, Port Au Prince, an 8-hour drive away from Cap Haitien.

I'm thankful
This trip is possible only through the support of our church and the faithful prayers of hundreds of friends. Also, a shout out to King Pharmaceuticals for donating ~$80,000 of medicine that we have carefully packed into 50-pound luggages.

See you on the other side!

hey, per my last post, you're not supposed to be reading this!! =) (and I'm not supposed to be posting)

oh well, while you're here:

So, what would it take for our hospitals to be the best run organizations on the face of the planet?

What do YOU think?
tony [at] hospitalimpact [dot] org

If you've been a regular reader of this blog, thanks! I've had a lot of fun blogging, and I hope you've had a lot of fun reading.

Now, for a weird suggestion... I encourage ya'll to take some time this week to do nothing but think. Too many people (myself included!) have lost the ability to think - to truly think out of the box (as cliche as that is). For me, information overload has caused thinking underload. Great leaders must be great distillers of information just as much as they are great learners.

It's like we all have a big bag of puzzle pieces (of information). Too often, I don't take the time to put the puzzle together - I'm too busy collecting more pieces and putting them in our bag. I'm so proud of how big my bag is even though I don't know what the puzzle is trying to tell us. What is the meaning of it all?

This week, take a break from all the blog-reading (even this one!), blogging, the craziness of work, and our hectic lifestyles. =) And actually, I won't be posting anything for the rest of this week. Here's why...

The timing actually works out pretty well. I'm going to Haiti next week on a medical missions trip with my church for ~2 weeks. Have no fear - I already have two entries that will be posted here and there (on time-delayed release). Plus, Lord willing, I come back in one piece, I'll tell ya about the medical experiences I had in Haiti, the poorest country in our hemisphere.

So, I'm going to try to follow my own advice. Instead of blogging this week, I'm going to take that time to reflect. There are too many puzzle pieces that I still need to fit together so that I can be fully ready for my trip.

It's time to take a breather and revisit the original vision that hospital impact was created for. what will it take for our hospitals to be the best run organizations on the face of the planet?

World-class organizations are sustained by world-class organizational cultures. We learned quite a bit in the If Disney Ran Your Hospital series. Your organizational culture may very well be your greatest weapon to beat out competitors, or it could be the achilles heel of your organization. With so much potential to harm or help, culture has to be treated with extra thoughtfulness by hospital leaders.

World-class organizations are run by world-class leaders. These people have to be second to none. They have to be more motivated, more wise, and more skilled than the majority of other leaders. That's why we looked at Jack Welch's take on leadership and thought through hospital implications. Leaders find a way to deal with the inherent tensions of leading - long-term vs. short-term, being positive vs. skeptical, living an example vs. relentlessly coaching others.

World-class organizations are constantly changing to stay world-class. That's why leaders have to be absolutely masterful in motivating change. if the Change Agent series taught me anything, it's that truly changing human beings may very well be the greatest challenge in business, in hospital management, and in our own personal development.

World-class leaders have world-class information at their fingertips to make their decisions. No way am I claiming that this blog is "world-class," but I hope that some of the news analysis and links have been helpful.

What else do you think is important to talk about? What have been the most helpful resources for your hospital or your organization? Leave a comment or email me at tony[at]hospitalimpact.org [at] is "@"].

Happy birthday to hospital impact!

Well, it's been one month since I started hospital impact. and what a ride it's been! Now that I have 30 days of blogging under my belt, I can safely say that:

Blogs on hospital administration/leadership are few and far between.

There are some good medical blogs by doctors, some good health IT blogs by IT professionals, and good policy & news blogs by consultants. But by and large, there's nothing solely for hospital leaders. Is this a fluke? Am I on to something new and novel? Or maybe no one's done it before because there's just not enough hospital leaders who even know what a blog is?

Search engines are weird

I enjoy learning new things.

As nerdy as it sounds, blogging seems to be yet another manifestation of this inherent curiousity and desire to learn. The physical process of writing and editing clarifies the idea in my mind, helping me to learn.

Other ways this has manifested itself? Last year, my sister and I were walking down the street and passed a crafts store. We went in with no agenda, but came out with yarn, two sticks, and a "how to" book. 3 hours later, we had knit an ugly scarf. Also, I recently decided to learn how to play the accordian. Just finished learning "The Godfather."

I'm a sucker for stats.

I don't know if this is a guy thing (i.e. the popularity of fantasy sports), a geek thing, or a performance-driven thing, but I watch my web statistics way too much. I need to publicly confess that I have looked at my blog stats page and hit "refresh" to see the hits number go up one by one.

by the way, the stats:
# of visits: 2,000+
# of unique visitors: 380
# of hits: ~37,000 hits (although probably ~30,000 of those are me checking stats)

# of times I've wanted to discontinue hospital impact: 3
# of times I've mistakenly visited a "bad" site while researching for hospital impact: 3
Average # of times I edit a post after it's been published: 4-5
# of times I've blogged when I should've been doing something else: ~20
# of sites that link to hospital impact: 4
# of people who have added hospital impact to their favorites (est.): 30
# of minutes it takes me to post an entry: ~40
# of spam hits from a paxil-selling website: 60
# of days I didn't post anything: 1

Starting this weekend, I will be taking weekends off to keep fresh. Go Bulls!

# of minutes I should have spent on this post: 30
# of minutes I actually spent on this post: 90

It's been really interesting seeing how ya'll end up on this site. Today, someone landed on my site through a yahoo search on "healthcare blogs."

Search engines are great and invaluable, but the fact that they work on such different algorithms confuses me.

when you do a search on healthcare blogs, hospitalimpact.org is...
- #2 & #3 on yahoo search
- not even in the top 250 on google or MSN Search

But if you do a search on "healthcare blogs" (with the quotations),
- #3 & #4 on yahoo search
- #17 on google
- not found in MSN Search

while we're on the topic of somewhat useless stats, wordcount (from the maker of tenbyten.org) says that "hospital" is the 651st most used word in the English language.

hospital just beat out friends, shown, and music, and was barely beat out by poor, award, and front. The #1 word? Clue: the word is in this sentence.

well, it's been two weeks since I started hospitalimpact.org. As I've been struggling with html code, sifting through hospital news, researching blogging trends, and thinking about hospital leadership, here are some observations.

Blogging for hospital leaders: an oxymoron?

Blogging may have been the "word of the year" in 2004 (ironically, "blog" narrowly beat out "incumbent"), but still very few people are familiar with blogs. Research has shown that only 7% of the population is "very familiar" with blogs. I'm pretty sure that % is even less for hospital leaders, which begs the question: why is hospitalimpact.org a blog in the first place? is a blog for hospital leaders an oxymoron? A valid question.

Blogging is fun for me... so far...
I realized something about myself this week: when I learn, I write, and when I write, I learn. so, because I love learning (apparently one of my strengths in strengthsfinder), I love to blog.

But as one visitor mentioned, blogging is like "having homework for the rest of your life." So far, thankfully, it hasn't been like that. It's been exciting to see how people end up on this site - one site out of 8 billion+ websites (websites outnumber people 4 to 3!?). And I've felt the child-like joy of learning something new.

Bloggers don't make money blogging

Even mildly popular bloggers that get thousands of hits per day probably can't blog for a living. It's simply not enough traffic to make it worth the while for advertisers or sponsors. Back-of-the-envelope calculations tell me advertisers pay ~0.5 to 1 cent per visit. Most bloggers blog on the side or as a marketing tool for their consulting firm or their day job. Of course, blogging doesn't cost that much either. $10-20 for a domain name plus $5-10 dollars/month for hosting, depending on your traffic. It's the time commitment that's killer.

Quality vs. Quantity
Yes, I admit it, I've been weak. Pumping out quantity instead of quality. Isn't one truly original thought/idea a week more valuable than 1 semi-new idea a day? Shouldn't I shoot for one shining idea vs. several dim ones? Stay tuned.

Anyway, thanks for visiting! hospitalimpact.org has already had 500+ visits simply from word-of-mouth (though I'm still trying to figure out how many of those hits was me). any riveting comments, random ideas, half-baked thoughts, crazy questions, effusive praise, ill-willed bashing, inspiration to share, offers of sponsorship or free pizza, feel free at tony[at]hospitalimpact[dot]org

Never heard of us? Chances are you haven't, since this site was turned on only last week! Hospitalimpact.org was started on March 25, 2005 in Chicago by Tony Chen. We're only 6 days old and it's already been a whirlwind of a time!

Hospitalimpact.org is the first and only healthcare blog dedicated for current and emerging hospital leaders, thinkers, and enablers. The vision is simple - to answer this question:

what will it take for hospitals to be the best run organizations on the face of the planet?

We'll do that from 4 different angles using 4 different blogs. First, get some fresh perspectives on why hospitals are so important. Hospitals are worth fightin' for. If we forget that, we are done. Then, find leadership insights drawn from leaders, thinkers, and organizations inside (and especially outside) of healthcare. And since we don't need to reinvent the wheel, link up to commentary on my favorite resources, books, and websites. Also keep an eye out on the scoop on hospitals. News you can use that signals new trends and opens up new strategies. Of course, you can look at it all together, too.

Also, occasionally, check out the about blog, where I make observations on healthcare blogging, my life as a hospital blogger, and other random things that come up.

Feel free to email me with questions, comments, ideas, tips, issues to be addressed, anything at tony[at]hospitalimpact[dot]org

Hope you enjoy the ride!

what will it take for hospitals to be the best run organizations on the face of the planet?

that is the question that I can't seem to let go.

these past few days have been quite humbling, I've realized how hopelessly clueless I am about putting up a presentable webpage. At times, I've felt like this dog - I can envision what I want, but I can't get there cuz I'm fenced in by my lack of web prowess.

I couldn't have done it without the forum communities of the blogging software I'm using. which actually brings me to one of the main purposes of this blog: to learn from each other. If each hospital could take the best of their knowledge and transfer it to all the others, and if hospitals could learn from the best run companies in the world, maybe hospitals could become the best run organizations on the face of the planet. that is the single-minded intention of this blog.

In the leadership section, I hope to explore topics like maximizing patient satisfaction, quantum leaps in hospital management, org culture, improving financial performance, strategic planning, influencing others, etc... by learning from other hospitals, other thinkers, other organizations. The most interesting part may very well be taking the lessons of the likes of Apple, Wal-Mart, and Southwest Airlines, and applying it to a hospital. My wife always laughs at me when we sit down at a restaurant and I "size up" the operations, branding, and competitive environment. "this is a perfectly positioned restaurant for this location," I say smugly. a little geeky? oh, yeah! I admit it. But it comes from a conviction that people (esp. leaders) have to take substantial time to think hard, process, and digest (not just learn or understand) information to really make an impact. We are a generation of news junkies and information junkies - too many have lost the ability to think original thoughts and to make the creative linkages between seemingly unrelated information.

the perspectives section aims for the same target, but goes at it from a different tact. Hospitals will never be the best run organizations on the face of the planet unless it employs the best, most motivated, most inspired, and most inspiring leaders on the face of the planet. (some hospital leaders I've met already fit this bill) Part of that is taking some time to gain perspective about why hospitals are so important, beautiful, and crucial - for individual lives as well as our society as a whole. If we forget why hospitals are worth fighting for, then we are lost.

the about section is more about this blog and about me. Blogging is a relatively new phenomenom and there is a lot to be said (and a lot for me to learn) about what makes a good blog.

the links section links you to my favorite websites, books, and resources. and the scoop section is noteworthy news. These sections are purposely focused (instead of comprehensive) and digestable. The problem in hospital management issues isn't the lack of information, it's that the information is too fragmented, too voluminous, and too disorganized to be useful. So this will be my humble attempt to prioritize, categorize, and connect.

Hope you enjoy the ride!

I'd love to hear from you! Email me with questions, comments, ideas, tips, items you want to see addressed at tony@hospitalimpact.org

the hospital I grew up with: Montgomery County Hospital, Blacksburg, VA. Back then, the building looked like a box - it didn't have that fancy semi-circle architecture. Of course, back then, it wasn't an HCA hospital.

much has already been written on the hospital's role in growing an economy, advancing society, providing peace of mind to a nation, etc. On a large scale level, all that is true. But on an individual level, hospitals are even more significant. it's hard to imagine life without hospitals. many of the most important moments of my life have happened in hospitals. new life... and new death... some of the greatest joys and sorrows, the darkest and happiest moments in life happen in the anonymous halls of our hospitals. People never leave hospitals unchanged - they are healed, fixed, broken, full of hope, fearful, relieved. somewhere between filling out the registration form and thanking the doctor, people's perspective on life changes, even if just for a moment. Our bodies are so resilient, yet so fragile. Our lives are so short, yet so precious.

strong leaders build strong organizations, and hospitals are no exception. there are some strong leaders in healthcare. unfortunately, the stereotype of hospital leaders is that they are the bad guys, the paper-pushing bureaucrats saying "no" to doctors and needy patients. More often than not, that's just not true. Most of the hospital leaders I've met have a passion for caring for patients. They might not wear stethoscopes around their neck. no, their tools to improve patient care are organizational behavior, leadership development, revenue cycle, and change management. maybe not as cool, but increasingly crucial. to be sure, they are businesspeople, yes, but their business is caring - making sure their hospitals are managed in a way to serve (and even delight) the patient. They do this while regulations change almost daily, payments from the government are erratic, billions of dollars of free care is administered unnoticed each year, and consumer groups bamboozle on their reputations. it's a thankless, complex, misunderstood, tough, and somewhat paradoxical job - they're driven by passion and profits. mission and margin.

if you are a hospital leader / thinker / enabler, this blog is for you. It'll all boil down to one simple question:

what would it take for hospitals to be the best run organizations on the face of the planet?

That is the question that I can't seem to let go. So, whether it's HIPAA, revenue cycle, quality, leadership, or whatever, I'm going on a journey to find some answers. and I have a feeling that some of those answers will come from unusual sources and unexpected places. Hope you enjoy the ride.