Q: What’s the best advice you ever received?
A: Have fun with whatever you are doing.
Q: What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in HM in your career?
A: The patients are much sicker and more complicated than when I first started. We have become really good at managing a lot of things as outpatients, so what is left is a lot of really challenging, time-consuming patients. It’s intellectually rewarding but can be exhausting when you are seeing 16 to 20 patients a day like that.
Q: What’s the biggest change you would like to see in HM?
A: I think we need better coordination with care and more connection to the outpatient setting. I often feel like I am sending my patients out into a black hole, and I just hope they end up with all the things I have ordered and recommended.
Q: For group leaders, why is it important for you to continue seeing patients?
A: Seeing patients is critical. It keeps me in touch with the issues and challenges that my providers deal with. It also creates a sense of teamwork and puts us on equal footing rather than my being perceived as a distant administrator.
Q: As a hospitalist, seeing most of your patients for the very first time, what aspect of patient care is most challenging?
A: Being in the hospital, by its very nature, places patients and families in circumstances that are often scary and out of their control. It creates a lot of emotions that can charge interactions. After so many years, the management and diagnosis can lose their sense of impact for providers, as it is daily routine. It is important to remember the patients’ perspective and learn ways to reassure and inform to defuse some of the high emotions.
Q: What aspect of patient care is most rewarding?
A: When a patient comes in very sick and I am able to identify and treat the problem and watch them make a good recovery. It feels like I am doing something meaningful and important in life.
Q: What is your biggest professional challenge?
A: Interacting with hospital administration, as there are often competing demands and desires that require politics, collaboration, and people skills to get everyone pulling in the same direction.
Q: What’s next professionally?
A: I am not sure. I am eager to see what doors the MPH opens for me. I would be interested in consulting work, helping smaller programs look at opportunities for growth and ways to collaborate and align interests with their hospital administrators. Also, working in health policy interests me.
Q: If you weren’t a doctor, what would you be doing right now?
A: I have written a book and a screenplay and really enjoy that. In my dream world, I would be able to work full time as an author.
Richard Quinn is a freelance journalist in New Jersey.