From Ebola preparedness to leading large-scale changes, today's master's degree programs are producing leaders eager to tackle this generation's most pressing challenges.
Rahul Anand, MD, is chief epidemiologist at Middlesex Hospital in Middletown, Connecticut, where he heads up all infectious disease prevention activities for the nonprofit integrated delivery network, from Ebola preparedness to hand washing. He's also adjunct assistant professor in the department of medicine at the University of Utah, where he worked full time prior to moving to the East Coast. On top of that, he is one-third of the way through an MBA program at the University of Massachusetts Isenberg School of Management. It will take him another two years to finish the online program.
Hospitals seek clinical partners who will integrate into the fabric of their organizations as they make key transformations in anesthesia, hospital medicine, and the ED.
Two years ago Saint Agnes Hospital set a new course for its emergency department: It was time to take patient satisfaction scores to the next level, as well as make critical changes to improve patient throughput. Admission and discharge times were too high, and too many patients were leaving without being seen. While the hospital had outsourced its ED for two decades with varying degrees of success, a strategic plan called for bringing on a brand-new national clinical partner to help revamp the department. "Our ED accounts for about 70% of our admissions," says Adrian Long, MD, CMO for the 276-bed teaching hospital in Baltimore. "The ED was the front door to the hospital, and it was important for us that we had providers who were going to improve these scores and our performance."
From the cloud and mobile devices to the latest in robotics, healthcare’s renegades are riding a new wave of transformational technologies.
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center, which sits on a steep hill in one of the city’s foggiest neighborhoods, may be only 30 miles north of Silicon Valley, but for its researchers and clinicians, technology disruption starts on the home turf. Unwilling to wait for others to develop the same slick apps and technologies that consumers have come to expect, UCSF is finding success forging its own innovative path. “When you are on your computer doing your work and you get a FaceTime message on your iPhone from your kid who’s 3,000 miles away, you ask, ‘Why can’t we do this in healthcare?’ ” says Robert Wachter, MD, chief of the division of hospital medicine and chief of medical service. “Here, when we see gaps like that, we have the inclination to develop a tool to fix it.”
For telemedicine trailblazer Robert Groves, MD, his first recollection of the technology is an illustration in a 1950s magazine article showing a little boy interacting with a physician over a video screen. Most of telemedicine's history, says Groves, "has been that model, that on-demand, limited time-frame interaction that facilitates both trust between the parties and the ability of the provider to assess the patient more than they would be able to by a telephone conversation." Today, however, Groves oversees a telemedicine program that is a "radical departure" from this early vision. As vice president of health management at Banner Health, a nonprofit healthcare delivery system based in Phoenix, Groves runs a teleICU program that enables physicians and other clinicians to remotely monitor critical care units hundreds of miles away. Introduced nine years ago, the technology has done more than just provide telemedicine consults between board-certified intensivists and providers in far-flung outposts: It has changed the way the system delivers critical care services.