Daniel J Meara, MD, DMD

I think that is a great idea Katie.

When the team is first formed, at the top of the initial agenda should be a description of team operations.  Included is this process for idea generation, you get an email, you return the email in 72 hours, no excuses, everyone participates.  You complete a whiteboard with all of the ideas before the meeting, s…[Read more]

I was just reviewing the discussion boards and found this incredibly insight.  I always love the character I introduced to you, Edwards Deming.  Every employee wants to do a great job when they have the opportunity to do so.  The key to our role as the leader is to provide them the opportunity and then the recognition when they perform.  If you…[Read more]

When I hear about this I go in two directs.  First meeting size.  Decisional meeting, no more than 8, anything over is strictly information distribution.  For creativity try to go 6 or less.

The second thing is meeting dynamics and idea generation.  Depending on the team, you may want to go with “Brain writing” on this issue.  Lots of strong pers…[Read more]

I moved this comment from Ralph that I found in the comments.

“For many of us ,our first experience with “teams ” are the rounding teams during our later years of medical school and early years of training. Whether or not those teams were functional by the standards presented in the video is not the issue. The issue is unlearning many of the pre…[Read more]

Thanks for the great insight into your organization.  You know I am always talking about transparency.  One of the problems with transparency is the level of knowledge of the people accessing the information.  When you have a staff that has little understanding  of financial statements, transparency could be problematic and create mis…[Read more]

Thanks Ralph

True that, it is easier to decide for people that to try to reach a consensus. It is easy to fish for someone and then just give them the product that it is to teach them to fish for themselves. Engaging providers and employees in general, is teaching them to fish and the consequences of that activity can be immense for the organization.

This came in from the comment section from
Ralph Salvagno
and I thought I would move it to the discussion forum.

“Bottom up leadership is difficult if your don’t have engagement from the bottom. You have to assess the barriers to engagement … are they created or self imposed? Without engagement we fall to an authoritarian style of decision mak…[Read more]

I was in a negotiation with the local hospital and they told me they did not track departmental level income statements.  I asked them how they follow the financial performance of any department and their reply was that they only collect those numbers organization wide.  Of course, I did not believe it, but that was the extent they were willing t…[Read more]

“One way to determine metrics of this is a survey of patients and to do random testing of the system.”

This is your data collection method.  What key quality characteristic will be be measuring?  I see two already.  One could be percentage of endless rings.  Another could be messages not received.  A more general could be missed contacts whic…[Read more]

You bring up 2 things. The first is about negotiating. We will get to that in the last course of the program. But for now, when there is an asymmetry of information, bad results occur. Over the short term it may benefit one party, in this case the employer, but when information evens out in the long term and you realize you got the short end of…[Read more]

Another from Sabir,

“Wow, that was a lot of good information. As you’ve said before, none of it was even brought up during any part of training, and for that matter during signing contracts or the first few years of my job. You really have to go out and seek this information; very detrimental if we don’t know since this is what pays our bil…[Read more]

I hear you Joe.  At the end of the day we want the candidate to like us and the candidate wants us to like them.  I think it is important to frame the conversation at the beginning.  We want more than a warm body.  We want more than a 75% RVU earner.  We want someone who will be happy here.  We hope you know that happy in the long run will have…[Read more]

My response to Joe

I agree, the advertising could be difficult. But think about the interview process or lack thereof. Typically for a hospital employment situation you come in and meet the physicians you will be directly working with. Lots of chit chat, maybe exchange about clinical issues but no scripted interview process to dive deeply into…[Read more]

This one is from Joe, he put in in the comments section and it was so good I moved it here for everyone to see.

“So is there any advantage from a practice standpoint in recruitment of physicians in noting all the items mentioned in the first negotiation video when recruiting physicians? Some advertisements focus on location and money – and you w…[Read more]

That actually is a pretty easy question.  We treat business skills, and in this case leadership, like we treat all of the other skills and knowledge we obtain as physician.  Only data driven, peer reviewed, proven knowledge is acceptable.  How do we obtain leadership skill.  We look at those who come before us and emulate their uninformed mos…[Read more]

Welcome to the class Raquel.  We are neighbors as I live in Arnold.  As a matter of fact, if the sun comes out today, we might go to the Navy baseball game and then over to First Sunday Annapolis.  I look forward to following your progress in the class and reading and replying to you discussion board comments.

To be honest, that is what I thought about financial statements.  After some practice I found I was pretty straight forward.  The statement I use in the presentation is from a $600 million non profit hospital system.  But when you get right down to it, the income statement is in the same form as every other income statement in the world.  Rev…[Read more]

Barbara

I wonder how you would characterize the efficiency of their collections?  What metric or data point would you focus on to track it.  In the next course you will learn about run charts and normal vs special variation.  The object would be to have a value that measures collection efficiency, track that each month in a run chart, and then de…[Read more]