Weekly Newsletter: PBS Documentary, Three Skills for Health Care Executives, and Global Chapter Call

For Dr. Lawrence Smith, medical school was memorization in a classroom. Today, he’s leading a totally different kind of medical education as the dean of Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine, a program that flips medical education on its head. Medical students first encounter patients not in a medical setting, but in patients’ own homes — where students care for them as emergency medical technicians (EMTs). “We want them to be always seeing patients as people in need of healing, not people who are just diseases presenting to their office,” Dr. Smith says. Learn more about how this program is redefining medical education in the 30-minute film, available online.

The health care industry is changing rapidly, with new types of organizations striving to improve the way care is delivered and increasingly calling on physicians, nurses, and other clinicians to perform executive roles. But the business side of health care requires different skills than providers typically learn in their clinical careers. Read Dr. Sachin Jain’s three essential skills for clinicians to succeed in management in a new article in Harvard Business Review, and get started building your leadership skills in our course L101: Becoming a Leader in Healthcare.

What’s an easy way to gain quality improvement skills? Open School online courses, of course! Join us for the next Global Chapter Call tomorrow, April 16, at 12 PM ET. You’ll hear from IHI Open School Regional Leaders, Chapter Leaders, and an IHI Open School Faculty Advisor about the best ways to incorporate the courses into your Chapter’s work. You’ll also get some tips on integrating quality and safety into your school’s curriculum. Click here to learn more.

Do you have a creative side? If so, check out two contests happening this spring — an essay competition to raise awareness about health care costs, and a chance to design a patient-facing tool to help patients with late-stage cancer understand their options. Click here to learn more about Costs of Care’s 5th Annual Essay Contest, offering $4,000 in prizes for the best stories illustrating the need for cost-awareness in health care; and click here to learn how to submit a design to the California Healthcare Foundation’s Decision Aid Upgrade Challenge, for a chance to win up to $5,000 while helping patients. Submissions for both contests are due at the end of May (May 31 and May 29, respectively).