RWL Newsletter #118
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! It’s tax weekend! My wife is a CPA, so that means she’ll be shut in her office all weekend taking care of all of her clients who waited till the last minute to bring in their records for 2018. As you can imagine, everyone in the Bonica household is looking forward to Tuesday when we get Mom back.
Picture above is from my organizational behavior course this week. Students were doing a teamwork exercise to demonstrate effective team behavior. This OB course is my favorite course I teach. It’s my favorite because I use open pedagogy techniques - specifically, I provide the students the overarching framework for the course, and then they decide on the topics they want to learn about and teach all the classes. I provide coaching and feedback. This game was actually part of a student-led class on teams. If you’d like to learn more about this technique, I have an article about it in the JHAE. E-mail me if you can’t access the article, but would like to read it.
On to this week’s links!
Read
What: Forbes, The World’s Cheapest Hospital Has to Get Even Cheaper
Why: Great article about international healthcare. In an already inexpensive system, how to make care affordable and thus sustainable? The solution: offer premium services for a premium price to cover the low payments from government provided insurance. In economics this is known as price discrimination. We engage in it in the US, just in a slightly different form. People with private insurance subsidize the care of people with government insurance (in addition to all taxpayers subsidizing government insurance directly through texes). India seems to be an exciting place for advances in healthcare delivery.
Watch
What: Venus and Mars: Why Can't Hospital Administrators and Physicians Get Along? (5 mins)
Why: This is an interview with Barry Silbaugh, MD, a past CEO of the American College of Physician Executives. This video is a little older (from 2012), but the issues haven’t changed much since then (or in the last 25 years or so that I’ve been around health care). I’m working with a physician leadership program right now and we have had discussions on many of the topics skimmed over in this short video. But in particular, toward the end Dr. Silbaugh talks about how physicians are trained to give orders, but very little gets accomplished in organizations by giving orders. Underlying Silbaugh’s comments is the reality that more physicians are going to become physician leaders as we continue to move toward different payment models. I think that’s an interesting idea, and likely one that is true. It seems to me there will continue to be downward pressure on physician earnings in a strictly clinical role. In order to preserve those earnings, it’s likely they will have to move into managerial roles in the future. I’m seeing this trend in many of the organizations I am working with. It’s still a small ratio, but it’s growing.
Listen
What: Art of Manliness Podcast, A Proven System for Building and Breaking Habits (56 min)
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/building-breaking-habits/
Why: This interview is with James Clear who has become something of a guru in the self-help genre dealing with habit formation. The interview starts out kind of slow with Clear talking about his personal experiences with getting injured in high school and overcoming that injury. But once the interview gets into the zone of discussing actual habit formation (as well as habit breaking), it is quite interesting. Some great tips about trying to change your environment to passively help you achieve your goals is important (if somewhat common sensical). I’m trying once again to lose weight and get into better shape, so this was the kind of occasional push I need.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line by e-mail, or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
Also, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
Have a great weekend and do amazing things!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." - Henry David Thoreau