It was like a cross between House and a video version of Car Talk for doctors with patients infected with Hepatitis C. Instead of breaking into people’s apartments to find some hidden environmental cause of a difficult to diagnose illness, a panel of experts at the University of New Mexico responded to questions from medical providers around the country, many in rural areas where it is hard to access doctors with Hepatitis C expertise. I connected our video conferencing system…
Like many people, I’m not all that fond of going to the dentist office to get a cavity filled. I hate getting the shots, having my mouth all numb, and listening to the sound of the drill. I do feel confident that my dentist has my safety in mind, but I’ve never seen it put to the test. Yesterday, however, I had an experience that caused me to reconsider my thoughts about drills and safety. Over the loudspeaker came a…
When I first interviewed at CHC, one of the selling points for me was the health center’s commitment to innovation. I must admit, I was a little skeptical. Innovation is a word thrown around by just about everyone these days, especially when it comes to social media or marketing. On the other hand, many organizations are only starting to get involved in social media, and I have yet to find another health center with a full time social media manager,…
Few things can start the day, or the week off worse than a required routine monotonous morning meeting. Maybe you’ve been to meetings like this yourself and you know how they go. People drone on and on about things that no one else is really interested in. It is just that there is an expectation that everyone will say something when no one wants to, or even prepares to speak. Such meetings have been the bane of many of my…
Last Thursday during a weekly TweetChat about community health centers the topic of drug resistant bacteria came up which led to some interesting comments about pharmacists at community health centers. I mentioned that we have some pharmacists and pharmacy students at CHC and was asked to provide more information about it. Unfortunately, I didn’t know an awful lot, so I decided it was best to put things off, do some research and then put up this blog post. When I…
Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness. – Robert Pirsig This morning, Health Affairs had a Briefing: Still Crossing the Quality Chasm. They also put up a blog post, Hospital Errors Ten Times More Common Than Thought?. It referred back to the Institute of Medicine’s landmark report, Crossing the Quality Chasm, which yesterday’s Conversations on Health Care guest, Dr. Lucian Leape helped write. I must admit, when I…