Background: At the University of Colorado, we developed the ‘Health Innovations Scholars Program’ (HISP), a 5-week intensive training program for pre-clinical medical students who seek to lead innovative transformation of the healthcare system. The program focuses on quality improvement, patient safety, leadership skills, design-thinking, and change management delivered through didactic sessions and applied to an [...]

Background: Healthcare has become exponentially more complex with intricate systems of care delivery and large, diverse, subspecialized provider teams. Because of the multi-faceted nature and promise of effective leadership, many healthcare systems have turned to leadership development as a strategy to address the challenges this complexity brings. Leadership development programs have historically targeted traditional hierarchical [...]

Background: Hospital medicine groups are often quickly expanding, which causes strategic planning to focus primarily on clinical needs and staffing. It can be difficult to find opportunities for goal setting where consensus within the group can be achieved. This is made even more difficult by the typical hospitalist group providing 24/7/365 coverage, so at no [...]

Background: Women represent half of our new physicians being added to practice, however the growth of women in leadership positions has lagged. Women physicians have higher burnout scores and higher suicide rates than male physicians. Women physicians deliver high quality healthcare as evident in surgical, emergency medicine, and hospital based outcome studies. Studies suggest that [...]

Background: Financial incentives motivate hospitals to focus on improving patient experience, quality indicators, and efficiency metrics. Efforts to geographically staff hospitalists have renewed the focus on quality improvement efforts at the inpatient unit level. However, in order to maximize the benefit of geographic staffing, a unit-level leadership structure and quality-improvement support system must be developed. [...]

Background: As hospital reimbursement models and publicly available CMS ratings place a stronger emphasis on improved patient throughput, safety, and satisfaction, it has become increasingly important for hospitals to develop cohesive care teams aligned with these goals. At our 800-bed quaternary care hospital located in suburban New York, care had historically been quite heterogeneous, with [...]