In the first article in this series, we looked at the Institute of Medicine’s STEEEP acronym, which stands for care that is Safe, Timely, Effective, Efficient, Equitable, and Patient-Centered. Timely care is the second pillar. Timeliness in a healthcare system prevents unintended and sometimes harmful delays in diagnosis, access, information/care transfer, stops (think of navigating your way through a hospital visit), and patient communication. The Institute for Healthcare Im

I recently returned from facilitating a staff training session for one of our clients. This was the fifth consecutive year that the clinic closed for a ½ day to allow the physicians to dedicate an afternoon to creating their annual strategic plan, while the staff participated in training and team building. A tremendous amount of good happens when you pull your team together in an environment outside of their normal day-to-day happenings. Not only is it focused time to work

How many books have you read and are able to recall the title after five, ten or more years? For me, Steven Covey’s Principle Centered Leadership is one of those books. Steven Covey tells us that unlike values, subjective and internal, principles represent true north. When recently challenged with the challenge of creating a compensation plan for a surgical group, a MedMan administrator first focused the conversation on principles. Why For all the reasons you know, it is with

On a scale of zero to ten, how likely is it that you would recommend MedMan to a friend or colleague? What is the primary reason for your score? I needed a reliable quantifiable measure to track the success of our initiatives to have clients for life. At the same time we want and have busy clients; doctors who don’t have time to deal with surveys in a world gone mad asking for satisfaction feedback. This two-question MedMan Promoter Score (mmPS) survey became our noninvasiv

Confronting employees about difficult issues, such as poor work performance, can be one of the most uncomfortable and difficult parts of a leader’s job. How is it that some can get the results they want and others end up making the situation worse? While many give some forethought to what they might say, most only prepare themselves for the soapbox speech and whether they can live without the employee if the person doesn’t agree. Fortunately there are a number of key points t

Last month, we looked at the Institute of Medicine’s STEEEP acronym, which stands for care that is Safe, Timely, Effective, Efficient, Equitable, and Patient-Centered. Safer care is the first pillar. Safety goes far beyond “trying” to keep patients safe. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) explains it this way: “This means much more than the ancient maxim ‘First, do no harm,’ which makes it the individual caregiver’s responsibility to somehow try extra hard to be

You’ve gone over the list of measures from CMS and compared it to which measures your EHR says it will report. Several of these measures are ones that you reported on during the era of PQRS and so you feel comfortable that you can do them and can do them well. There shouldn’t be much of a problem… right? Of course not. We should know by now that it is never that easy. There are two things that each group should take into consideration. First, there are measures that were carr

Starting a geographically distributed company with operations in several time zones 40 years ago forced MedMan to become digital before digital was cool. This necessity proved to be the mother of early adoption, and that leveraging of technology has turned out to be an ongoing competitive advantage for us. For example we’ve learned how the run a multi-million dollar company without an office. Our offices are wherever our cell phones are. The one concession to physical spac

In this day and age, there is great value in leveraging your network and connecting with industry leaders via email and social platforms such as LinkedIn. Sometimes it takes more effort and you have to be more deliberate about stepping away from behind our computer screens and wander around the office, or schedule a lunch to connect with other professionals. Even more so, being out of the office to attend a conference seems overwhelming due to the amount of work that will b