Fellow Blogs

“Focus on the Relationship.” 

The name of my Primary Care Transformation Fellowship Project reflects my belief that primary care medicine is best when it is personal and grounded in a relationship.  While acute episodes may arise, the continuity of a care relationship helps achieve better prevention, planning, incremental decision-making, and management decisions.  Providers can see their patients ben

A few years ago, I found a greeting card with an illustration of a sailboat speeding across blue waters, sun aglow above. “The winds of change are always blowing, all you have to do is raise your sails.” It really resonated with me at the time, so much so that I bought the card and have had it framed on a wall of my home ever since.

“If you can't change something, change the way you think about it." This quote was at the bottom of every email my longtime mentor would send out. For years, I never really paid attention to it, as so many people include their title, department, or other company-related info after their name.

“Work smarter, not harder.” I remember my father telling me this as a teen while trying to decide what my future would be like. We have heard this line before, but what does it mean?  My father was referring to his blue collar physically laborious job and he wanted more for me than working with my hands. 

Primary care is not easy. With every patient encounter comes paperwork, results, patient communications, etc. It is easy to get overwhelmed. We know all too well that burnout is affecting 1 out of every 2 providers. When asked what the issue is, we can rattle off a list of complaints and “pains” of work.

“Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” This quote was below my high school yearbook picture in my senior year. A quick Google search now tells me that there is no proof that Ralph Waldo Emerson ever said it and it wasn’t in any of his works.

Look around, it is coming. We are currently rushing into a post-digital era. The pace of technological change is zooming across society in an astonishing fashion (pun intended), and health care is not an exempt industry from this.

A couple of months ago, during another night of catching up on my Maestro in-basket work, I came across Apollo 13 on TV and stopped to watch the movie I have seen more times than I can count.

This past Christmas, my kids were determined to make a jewelry box for my wife as her present. I don’t know where they came up with the idea, but they weren’t changing their minds. The problem was, and is, that I am not a carpenter nor do I have the tools to pull off this project.

When I started this journey with the Primary Care Transformation Fellowship in the fall of 2019, I was really looking forward to having dedicated time to plan, work, learn and— most importantly—apply knowledge to my project and my clinic. The whole idea of the fellowship is change, to transform our practice in some way to make it better.