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Hospital Impact has been ranked one of the top 50 healthcare blogs by Wikio.
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by Raymond Hino
I focus a lot of my blog posts on community engagement and maintaining open lines of communication between our community hospitals and the people that we serve. This is an ever-evolving process.
Recently we tried something new to communicate with and educate the public. We held our first ever "Summit on Hospital Finances." We wanted to put on a program that would be worthy of the three-hour weeknight time commitment that we were asking our constituents to make.
Here is how it went: The program started with an outside speaker bringing into context where the plight of our local hospital is in the greater scheme of the healthcare environment. It was important for our community to know that what is happening in our area is not only a local phenomenon, but happening all across California and our country.
In 1979, my young son came home from school with pictures of what his parents did for a living. Mine was an entire page covered in circles and when I asked him what he thought I did, he replied, "You make rounds."
I thought it was funny--but I also realized my little boy had no idea how deeply I cared about the patients I shared my days, and sometimes my nights, with.
As an adult, he has come to know the depth of caring physicians hold in their hearts and minds as we go about our work. Yet as these years have passed, and as the culture of medicine has shifted in intensity, demand, diminished autonomy and the multitude of variables we whisper about every day, that very caring has become less visible to our patients.
I recently attended something called the Landmark Forum, three days of self-introspection.
The net-net: Things in life happen. We then create a story around it. The story then defines our reality. And it limits our possibilities.
See, we all show up at work with baggage. We have stories of why things are the way they are and they affect all aspects of human relationships.
In his Marketing Profs article, Howard Lax, Ph.D., says the memory of an experience trumps the actual experience.
Context, he says, defines the parameters of our thinking and sets our expectations. That is why it is so hard to break out of context and why only a handful of visionaries can break through the boundaries and imagine and build things never before envisioned.
by Greg Slabodkin, FierceMobileHealthcare
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs provides medical services for more than eight million veterans each year through the Veterans Health Administration, the largest integrated healthcare system in the country with over 1,700 sites of care.
However, much of VHA's infrastructure was designed and built decades ago under an older concept of healthcare delivery that focused on hospital-centered, inpatient care.
To better address the medical needs of today's veterans, the VHA has launched a number of mobile healthcare initiatives. Neil Evans, M.D., and Kathleen Frisbee, MPH, Ph.D.c, who co-direct the VHA's Connected Health Office, spoke with FierceMobileHealthcare about the agency's mHealth pilot programs.
To learn more about the VHA's vision for mobile healthcare, read the full interview at FierceMobileHealthcare.
In anticipation of National Nurses Week, I dedicate my monthly guest post to them not only because my wife of 28 years is a nurse but also because nurses have taught me lessons about how to be a more caring physician.
I reinforce my previous salute to Nikki, an emergency room nurse in Massachusetts who took me aside and told me, "Just because that was your eighth patient with the same condition doesn't mean that it was her eighth sprain." Eventually, I got over my wounded pride and adopted the perspective that she viewed me as teachable.
Read more!