Wednesday, November 26, 2008

No Silver Bullet Letter

I wanted to give our readers an opportunity to review the open letter I recently submitted to President-elect Barack Obama. Hopefully the President-elect finds this helpful in navigating the healthcare crisis he is about to inherit. As always, I am interested in your views, as well.

Click here to view the letter

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

The ACPE in Tucson AZ, November 2008

I am in Tucson AZ teaching my favorite course for the American College of Physician Executives at the Fall Institute. The course is called the Three Faces of Quality, and I have profiled this previously. This week represents the 15th anniversary since the debut of the course and it has evolved along with the field of quality and safety. I am grateful to the ACPE for giving me the opportunity to meet colleagues from around the country, and each class, numbering nearly 100, presents a different pedagogic challenge. This week we are tackling virtually every topic under the quality and safety umbrella---issues like cultural barriers to improvement, public accountability for outcomes, unexplained variation in the quality of care, and much more. If you are interested to learn more about the ACPE go to www.acpe.org and be sure to check out both the Three Faces and our Advanced Applications course too. How can we do more to get the tenets of quality and safety into the medical curriculum?? How can we create incentives that will influence providers to pay more attention to these issues?? I am interested in your views here. The ACPE is clearly part of the answer to these complex questions!! DAVID NASH

Monday, November 3, 2008

Recent Travels

A few days ago in Boston, the Lucian Leape Institute of the National Patient Safety Foundation hosted an amazing meeting. This invitation only affair brought together most of the key stakeholders with a deep interest in changing how undergraduate medical education approaches the key topics of quality and safety. Among the guests were the leaders from AHRQ, NPSF, ABMS, ACGME, ABIM, and a host of others. I was proud to be one of the authors of the three submitted position papers that helped to guide and stimulate the discussion. As you might imagine, this group had a raucous conversation and a professional facilitator kept it very well on track. The bottom line, there is a lot of work to do in an attempt to really change some of the tightest cultural beliefs in medical education. We must get to students as early as possible in the spectrum of training, even years one and two in medical school. We need a curriculum and we need better informed faculty on these issues too. I am hopeful that our new Jefferson School of Health Policy and Population Health will be a key step in the right direction here. I am confident that we could help to produce just the sort of leaders that the stakeholders at this meeting called for. I really admire Lucian Leape, Dennis O'Leary and Don Berwick----the three nationally prominent hosts of this meeting as they attempt to transform medical education. What do you think we need to do in order to transform medical education for the future?? Clearly a key question!!! Thanks for your continued support, DAVID NASH