Courses

Effective Medical Practice Leadership, Teamwork and Human Resource Management

Faculty: Jeffrey D. Kudisch

Despite its importance, truly effective teamwork is extremely difficult to achieve. In health care organizations tasks are highly interdependent, requiring people from a variety of disciplines and perspectives to work together to render care. Success in such collaborative settings requires team leaders to spend considerable time deftly maneuvering through emotional and political waters. Unfortunately, research and practice suggest that even the brightest of leaders are ill-equipped to handle such challenges. For instance, leaders are often stymied by the difficulties of managing interpersonal conflict, to the point of considering direct confrontation as “taboo.” From a larger organizational perspective, teams that fear conflict fail to tap the opinions and perspectives of team members and waste time and energy with posturing and managing interpersonal risk. In health care this is particularly critical since team dysfunction can impact medical errors, quality of care, and patient safety. During this session participants will learn about a framework designed to better understand team effectiveness and minimize team dysfunctions. Specifically, we will explore strategies for helping teams (1) establish trust with one another; (2) constructively challenge each other’s thinking; (3) develop a more complete, deeper understanding of and commitment to issues; (4) enhance accountability and engagement; and (5) ultimately make better decisions.

Essentials of Finance and Accounting for Small Businesses

Faculty: Michael Faulkender

This course will help doctors understand the accounting that underlies their practice and any small business. The class will discuss several key financial ratios that can be used to track the financial health of the practice. It will also discuss the levers that can be pulled to increase the efficiency and soundness of the business’s income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement.

Marketing Professional Services

Faculty: P.K. Kannan

Professional services have marketing challenges that go beyond those of a small manufacturing shop. Services are intangible, so we cannot inventory them nor can we display them for evaluation by the potential customer. Services are created at the same time they are consumed, making the individuals delivering the service (doctors, nurses and staff) critical to the success of the firm, and they are perishable so that we cannot pre-make a service and store it for times of high demand. Each of these issues means that services must be marketed differently than those of a typical “goods” manufacturer. This course will cover these items as well as strategies for helping build awareness of your service / practice and the fulfillment of the brand promise to your constituents. This session will be backed by research from our Center for Excellence in Service.

Effective Medical Practice Operations

Faculty: Bruce L. Golden

Operations management is a field of business that focuses on the efficient and effective production and delivery of goods and services. This course applies concepts from operations management to medical practices. It begins with a brief introduction to operations management with respect to the health care sector. Techniques for focusing on the most important problems, projects, tasks, and bottlenecks as well as management by constraints will be presented. Next, we discuss ideas that help to manage patient flow, increase throughput, and reduce employee turnover and overtime. One key factor in the effective management of a medical practices is that appropriate data need to be collected, monitored, and analyzed on a regular basis. Several examples of this will be provided. In addition, emerging issues such as the impact of retail (minute) clinics and concierge (retainer or boutique) medicine will be discussed. Additional topics, such as risk management, will be addressed, if time permits.

Effective Negotiations

Faculty: Joyce E. A. Russell

Negotiating to a win-win outcome is an essential part of effective business practice today, whether your negotiation partner is across the world, across the country, or across divisions in your company. This session will expose you to well-tested strategies that ensure you negotiate an outcome that not only satisfies you, but leaves your counterpart satisfied as well. We'll spend part of the course in simulated negotiation exercises where you'll get the opportunity to practice and hone your new skills. In this course, you'll learn the appropriate use of power during bargaining exchanges; key principles of effective listening; bargaining strategies and tactics to achieve outcomes that are most important to you; and how to ensure that both parties in a negotiation reach a settlement that both can fulfill.

Information Technology in Medical Offices

Faculty: Ross Martin

There is little doubt that the practice of medicine, both from a clinical perspective as well as an administrative one is being profoundly influenced by information technology. Policy makers are increasingly looking toward health information technology (HIT) as a key mechanism for addressing quality of care and cost deficiencies in the US healthcare system. The recent stimulus package has allocated over $20B to electronic health records and multiple incentives for providers to adopt and use health IT. From electronic prescribing to computerized physician order entry to clinical decision support, there is a bewildering array of health IT that needs to be incorporated into daily practice routines. There is also a growing movement to engage consumers more in the management of their own health, supported by technologies such as personal health records.

This course will introduce participants to emerging eHealth initiatives and their implications for clinical practice and successful management of a medical practice. It will discuss the technologies that physicians need to consider for adoption today and tomorrow, and present tools and frameworks for assessing the value of these investments. Typical challenges and barriers faced in implementing these technologies will be presented, along with strategies for overcoming them. The Center for Health Information and Decision Systems at the Smith School of Business has been engaged in research on these and other related topics for several years. This session will include a brief discussion of key findings from the center’s research and present the future landscape of health IT. Best practices and lessons learned from successful and unsuccessful health IT implementations will be summarized. 

Business Law

Faculty: Robert Roth

This course introduces participants to civil law and the legal process in the United States. Topics include civil procedure and tort law, including product liability. The course will also cover contract law and an overview of antitrust law. The course will familiarize participants with legal issues, as they arise in a medical context, provide them with a legal vocabulary and an introduction to legal analysis.

Running a Small Business – Strategies for Success

Faculty: Hugh Courtney

Medical practices and their physician leaders make strategic decisions such as investments in new technologies and medical devices and agreements with health insurers which have a profound impact of the quality and efficiency of patient care they provide and the ongoing financial viability of their practices. These decisions are being made in increasingly turbulent economic environments as government regulation, competitor offerings, insurance coverage, and healthcare business models are in constant flux. How can physicians make sense of these complex forces at work in the healthcare industry today so that they might make the right strategic decisions for their patients and practices and follow a sound strategic plan to ensure long-term achievement of their missions?

As Wilkinson (2001) argued, in this healthcare era business concepts, tools and frameworks may be a valuable asset for physicians. In particular, the strategic management literature offers clear guidance on how physicians may better understand the forces at work and key uncertainties in the healthcare industry today (Porter, 2008; Christensen, Bohmer and Kenagy, 2000; Courtney, 2001); rigorously assess practice strengths and weaknesses relative to competitive healthcare offerings (Collis and Montgomery, 1995); develop sound strategic plans (Hambrick & Fredrickson, 2001); and build organizations that are best positioned to successfully implement those plans (Bradach, 1996).

This course will introduce physicians to concepts, tools and frameworks from strategic management research and best-practice companies and demonstrate how these ideas can be used to make and implement better strategic decisions that result in improved patient care and increase the probability of long-term financial viability for their practices.