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Teen Poses As A Physician’s Assistant: How Did This Happen?

Did you hear about the 17 year old teen that posed as a physician assistant at a Florida hospital for five days and got away with it? Are you surprised? I’m not.

It seems that Matthew Scheidt, had a summer job working part-time for a surgical supply company. He allegedly went to the Human Resources Department of the Osceola Regional Medical Center (ORMC) and convinced them that he was a Physician Assistant student at Nova Southeastern University and lost his identification badge. This is the hospital where many of my former patients were forced to go for medical care because they were either uninsured or received Medicaid. My former employer had a fiscal relationship with them. The use of the word “forced” is quite appropriate because my uninsured patients had no options. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Linda Burke-Galloway*

Tips For Physicians: Dealing with Difficult Colleagues

Recently I attended a CME course entitled “Dealing with Difficult Colleagues.”  It was part of my medical malpractice company’s risk management series to teach physicians/nurses how to lessen our risk of being sued.

This lecture was given by Linda Worley, MD who is a psychiatry professor at UAMS.  She is a good speaker, easy to understand, engages the crowd, and knows her subject.

My only complaint would be that it focused only the “angry” or “frustrated” physicians who exhibit unprofessional behavior and did not include the ones whom you suspect might be difficult due to impairment (illness, drugs, alcohol).

Difficult colleagues can impact a team (in office, OR, or hospital) by creating low morale, high staff turnover, inefficiency, decreased patient satisfaction, increased risk for poor patient outcomes, and increased risk of litigation.

Here are some of the A-B-C-D strategies given for handling “horizontal” hostility (or hostility handed from one person to another to the next in the team): Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*

How To Get Involved In Social Media

When healthcare reform became law, HR and benefits professionals I spoke with had two reactions: surprise and annoyance. Surprise, because they thought reform was dead; annoyed, because the law was full of provisions that didn’t make sense to them. But it was partly their own fault.

Blogs and other social media were buzzing with healthcare reform talk for more than a year, and were more influential than ever. But HR and benefits professionals –- experts in the topic –- were mostly on the sidelines. They didn’t shape the debate, didn’t point out when people didn’t know what they were talking about, didn’t talk about how what was proposed would affect what they did for a living.

Don’t take my word for it. A study last year on social media use by HR professionals revealed some striking results:

  • Only 13 percent use RSS feeds, tags and bookmarks
  • Only 5 percent post original content to blogs and website
  • Only 4 percent post ratings and reviews or comments on blogs and online forums

Reform shows there are real consequences to this failure to participate in social media. If you’re not part of the conversation, you’re marginalizing yourself, losing influence within your organization and the world.

So let this be a wake-up call: Get involved in social media. Easy to say, but how do you get started? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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