Leslie Flores writes…
Welcome to SHM’s newest online endeavor, The Hospitalist Leader blog. Your blogging team is excited about this great opportunity to explore a wide range of practice management topics, and we hope that our posts invite a lot of member interaction, interesting dialogue, and the regular expression of differing opinions and points of view.
Our goal is to offer commentaries about current hospitalist practice management issues that are interesting, insightful, original, and even occasionally a bit provocative. We aim to serve as a resource and to educate – but even more important, we want to foster broader thinking and a free exchange of perspectives and ideas that will ultimately lead to innovation and new best practices.
Allow me to introduce our blogging team.
Robert Bessler MD is the founder, President and CEO of Sound Inpatient Physicians. Rob created Sound as a physician-centric, patient focused hospitalist company; his vision to create a culture of partnership within the hospitalist teams and among hospital staff and administration is redefining the role of hospital medicine and developing the next generation of care. Rob received his medical degree and training from Case Western Reserve School of Medicine and the Cleveland Clinic, and holds a degree in Economics from Tufts University. He is board certified in emergency medicine and continues to practice. Prior to his work with Sound he developed a biomedical consulting business; the company had projects with biomedical development companies and the National Institutes of Health.
John Nelson MD is a practicing hospitalist and the medical director of his hospital-employed practice at Overlake Hospital Medical Center in Bellevue, WA. In addition to his work at Overlake, John consults with hospitalist practices all over the country, and is an active speaker and writer on the subject of hospitalist practice management – including serving as course director and faculty of SHM’s ‘Best Practices in Managing a Hospital Medicine Program’ pre-course and writing a monthly column for The Hospitalist. John attended college and medical school at Wake Forest, and did his internal medicine training at the University of Florida. Together with Win Whitcomb MD, John founded the Society of Hospital Medicine in 1997.
Robert Chang MD is a clinical instructor and director of the Medicine Faculty Hospitalist Group at the University of Michigan, where he leads the non-teaching hospital medicine service. Robert obtained his B.S. in Chemistry and Biology from Williams College in Massachusetts, and completed medical school and internal medicine residency at the University of Michigan. In addition to caring for patients and teaching, Robert pursues his research interests in the application of Toyota LEAN principles to quality improvement efforts and the use of information technology in patient care improvement.
Rusty Holman MD serves as Chief Operating Officer of Cogent Healthcare, a national hospitalist company. The immediate past president of SHM, Rusty has a long-standing and passionate commitment to leadership development. He was instrumental in the creation of SHM’s Leadership Academy, and has been an invaluable contributor to its ongoing success. After receiving his undergraduate and medical degrees from Washington University in St. Louis, Rusty trained in internal medicine at the University of Minnesota where he subsequently served as Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine and as the internal medicine residency program director. He also served as Medical Director of Hospital Services for HealthPartners Medical Group & Clinics in Minneapolis prior to joining Cogent.
Finally, my name is Leslie Flores and I’ll be serving as the blog’s moderator and as an occasional contributor. I’m not a hospitalist, but a former hospital administrator with a background in hospital operations, business development and physician practice development. I earned my B.S. in Biology from the University of California at Irvine and a Master’s degree in Healthcare Administration from the University of Minnesota. In addition to serving part-time as the Director of SHM’s Practice Management Institute, I am John Nelson’s consulting partner, and have been working with hospitalist programs all over the country for about five years.
Here’s how the blog will work. Each member of the blogging team will post new comments once or twice a month, with at least one new post from someone each week. In addition to our regular blogging team, we will occasionally invite guest bloggers with unique expertise or perspectives to comment on timely topics. Each post may be on a different issue, so chances are we will have multiple conversations on multiple topics occurring at once. We invite you to post responses, and to continue and expand the dialogue. In addition to being an interactive tool that invites reader participation, the blog will organize prior posts by topic and provide a searchable database of archived topics. If you have specific comments or questions you prefer not to post publicly, feel free to e-mail me at [email protected].
We hope you enjoy the blog, and find it valuable. This new interactive resource is just one of many exciting changes you’ll be seeing to the practice management content on the SHM website over the next few months, as we implement our vision for the Practice Management Institute.
Stay tuned!
Leslie
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