Archive

Perspectives in Primary Care features writing from practitioners, activists, and community members representing organizations, practices, and institutions across the United States and around the world.

Ensure Access to Care & Protect Patients from Immigration Enforcement at Medical Facilities

There are numerous barriers immigrants face when trying to access medical care in the United States. Unfortunately, the threat and presence of immigration and law enforcement at healthcare facilities is one of them. Immigrants, communities of color, and border residents often fear being questioned, ...

Educating Physicians to be Leaders

This article originally appeared in HealthManagement.org The connection between great leaders and successful organizations that effectively innovate to remain competitive and provide shareholder value has been well demonstrated in business. To that end, many industries have, for decades, offered leadership development and training programs as a strategy to cultivate a pipeline of leaders; leadership development as an industry is valued at over $15 billion ...

Mentorship: Not a One-Way Street

I recently had the amazing opportunity to both witness and participate in an event where my Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) pediatric mentor received a Lifetime Achievement Award for her many years of exemplary service to the pediatric community of Southern New Jersey. My mentor’s leadership, compassion, and dedication to serve the Latino community has set an example, not only for patients and their families, but for generations of pediatricians who have come to depend on her for strong mentorship and wise guidance. As her mentee, it was a proud moment to watch my ...

Emotional Intelligence in Medicine: A Two-Way Street

In the early evenings after work, I thoroughly enjoy taking brisk walks. Walks are a great opportunity to exercise of course, but I also cherish making time for myself to process the many thoughts that can occupy the mind of a busy wife, mother, pediatrician and medical director. My walks are typically the only time of the day when I can quietly meditate, ruminate, prioritize concerns or simply restore my soul. As I walk, I get to see families pushing strollers filled with young children, dogs walking their humans, and even the stray teenager riding a scooter or bike around the ...

Moving Upstream: Addressing Social Determinants of Health

The Primary Care Improvement Network (PCIN) is a membership-based network focused on supporting practice transformation, quality improvement, leadership skills, and the dissemination and spread of best practices. The program brings together important primary care stakeholders to address ongoing health care challenges. The goal of the program is to develop high-performing interdisciplinary teams to engage the PCIN themes of 2019-2020, which include effective implementation of telemedicine and effectively address health-related social needs. In the Primary Care sphere, there ...

Where does the individual physician fit in the new medicine?

By Steven A. Barrett, MD, FAAFP I am realizing that practice management in the new medicine is derived more from “group-think” than individual initiative. While this might work well for large medical organizations, where does it leave the imaginative individual physician trying to create improved medical care delivery systems? Of course, I am speaking from personal experience and raising this issue as a challenge to our medical system to be more open and inclusive and take advantage of all available bright ideas for improvement. ...

Trust - Abundant Team Principles

Effective models of trust: How can you incorporate the all-important ingredient of trust within your healthcare team? Once upon a time, it was possible for a doctor to hold most of what she needed to know to practice medicine within her own brain. This was long before Google and before medicine was carved up into specialties and sub-specialties. The advances brought on by the information age and technology mean that no individual can know all there is to ...

MIT-HMS Healthcare Innovation Bootcamp

Eighty-eight innovators from around the world convened in Boston on August 12th for the first ever MIT-HMS Healthcare Innovation Bootcamp. The program engaged a diverse group of thought-leaders, from early stage entrepreneurs to doctors, to designers, biomedical engineers, innovation leaders and others. While standing in a large health innovation hub overlooking Boston’s iconic Fenway Park, attendees from 30 different countries came face to face with the peers who would join them on the intense, ...