Get the knowledge needed to serve as an effective Medical Executive Committee Member and fulfill the role well. The MEC Essentials Handbook breaks down the medical executive committee role to facilitate understanding of the responsibilities and strategies for being an exemplary committee member. Oftentimes physicians end up in a leadership position without really knowing what the job entails and what they are meant to accomplish. This handbook can be used as a comprehensive guide for physician leaders throughout their appointment, providing them with the necessary skills and knowledge they may not have received as part of their medical school training and residency. Plus, to make staff training easy, this handbook includes a customizable PowerPoint(R) presentation highlighting key takeaways covered in the handbook. Benefits of The MEC Essentials Handbook: Earn CE and certification credits Assess, document, and comply with The Joint Commission's core competencies Verify the competence of advance practice professionals and allied health professionals Understand the role of physician leaders in focused professional practice evaluation (FPPE), ongoing professional practice evaluation (OPPE), and peer review Overcome challenges presented by low- and no-volume providers and legal issues such as negligent credentialing Avoid costly, time-consuming fair hearings Oversee professional conduct and confront disruptive behavior What's inside: Compare and contrast the roles and responsibilities of the medical staff, management, and board Describe the dimensions of physician performance Explain the role of MEC as oversight for the credentialing and privileging committee Explain the role of MEC as oversight for the peer review, quality, and patient safety committees Describe the MEC's role in overseeing disruptive physician behavior, according to the law and Joint Commission standards Identify the seven factors of successful medical staff development planning Derive strategies to streamline MEC meetings Table of Contents Chapter 1: Roles and responsibilities of the medical staff, management, and board Chapter 2: The Power of the Pyramid: How to achieve great physician performance Chapter 3: The MEC's role in credentialing and privileging Chapter 4: The MEC's role in peer review, quality, and patient safety Chapter 5: The MEC's role in managing professional conduct Chapter 6: The MEC's role in strategic collaboration with the hospital Chapter 7: Effective MEC meetings

This handbook will help physician leaders understand the role of the medical executive committee (MEC) in quality improvement, peer review, and credentialing and privileging. It provides information on the latest standards from The Joint Commission and serves as a guide for navigating the relationship between MEC members and the governing board and medical staff. Emphasis is on a physician performance improvement approach, with chapters on the MEC's role in appointing excellent physicians and measuring and managing performance. There is also material on governance, administration, communication, and leadership. Quizzes, checklists, and sample forms are included. Hoppa is a family physician and physician consultant. There is no subject index.

The Institute of Medicine study Crossing the Quality Chasm (2001) recommended that an interdisciplinary summit be held to further reform of health professions education in order to enhance quality and patient safety. Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality is the follow up to that summit, held in June 2002, where 150 participants across disciplines and occupations developed ideas about how to integrate a core set of competencies into health professions education. These core competencies include patient-centered care, interdisciplinary teams, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, and informatics. This book recommends a mix of approaches to health education improvement, including those related to oversight processes, the training environment, research, public reporting, and leadership. Educators, administrators, and health professionals can use this book to help achieve an approach to education that better prepares clinicians to meet both the needs of patients and the requirements of a changing health care system.

Second in a series of publications from the Institute of Medicine's Quality of Health Care in America project Today's health care providers have more research findings and more technology available to them than ever before. Yet recent reports have raised serious doubts about the quality of health care in America. Crossing the Quality Chasm makes an urgent call for fundamental change to close the quality gap. This book recommends a sweeping redesign of the American health care system and provides overarching principles for specific direction for policymakers, health care leaders, clinicians, regulators, purchasers, and others. In this comprehensive volume the committee offers: A set of performance expectations for the 21st century health care system. A set of 10 new rules to guide patient-clinician relationships. A suggested organizing framework to better align the incentives inherent in payment and accountability with improvements in quality. Key steps to promote evidence-based practice and strengthen clinical information systems. Analyzing health care organizations as complex systems, Crossing the Quality Chasm also documents the causes of the quality gap, identifies current practices that impede quality care, and explores how systems approaches can be used to implement change.

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received. In Unequal Treatment, a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients' and providers' attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed. How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.

The Medical Staff Leader''s Survival Guide William K. Cors, MD, MMM, FACPE An affordable, time-sensitive solution to medical staff leadership training. Physicians who accept or are assigned leadership positions are often left on their own to develop leadership skills and educate themselves about their responsibilities as medical staff leaders. Just because a physician is a great clinician does not mean he or she is a great leader. The challenges of being a successful medical staff leader are twofold: You must be well-versed in your role and responsibilities (i.e., peer review, credentialing, medical staff bylaws), and you must inspire other medical staff members to follow the rules while continuing to deliver excellent patient care. A well-trained medical staff leader is vital to the culture of a hospital''s medical staff and can save a hospital from the expense of lawsuits affiliated with negligent credentialing/peer review. This book aims to teach physicians how to become great medical staff leaders and how to motivate other medical staff members on topics such as: AHP credentialing and supervision Reappointment challenges Physician-hospital competition Liability risks Medical staff disharmony and distrust Table of Contents Chapter 1: Where to Begin? Principles of Governance Chapter 2: Meetings: The Cost of Holding a Meeting Chapter 3: Meetings: How to Run an Effective Meeting Chapter 4: Overcoming Physician Apathy Chapter 5: Job Descriptions: Medical Staff Leaders Chapter 6: The VPMA/CMO: Where This Fits Chapter 7: Credentialing and Privileging: Requirements, Guidelines and Tips Chapter 8: New Technology Privileges Chapter 9: Privileging Disputes and How to Resolve Them Chapter 10: Advanced Practice Professionals Chapter 11: Low-Volume, No-Volume Practitioners Chapter 12: The Aging Physician Chapter 13: Proctoring (FPPE) Chapter 14: Peer Review (OPPE): Some Best Practices Chapter 15: Dealing with the Physician with Problems Chapter 16: Corrective Action: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Chapter 17: Physicians and Hospital Administration: They''re Just Different Chapter 18: EMTALA and Emergency Department Coverage Chapter 19: Conflicts of Interest Chapter 20: Economic Credentialing Chapter 21: Physician-Nursing Relationships Chapter 22: Health Care Finance: A Primer Chapter 23: Medical Errors Disclosure Chapter 24: Employed Practitioners Chapter 25: Contracted Practitioners Chapter 26: Confidentiality Chapter 27: Accreditation and Regulation Chapter 28: Bylaws and Related Documents Chapter 29: Medical Staff Governance: Myths and Misconceptions Chapter 30: Personal Characteristics of Great Leaders Who will benefit from this book? Directors of medical staff offices, vice presidents of medical affairs, medical staff presidents, credentials committee chairs and members, committee and department chairs

America's health care system has become too complex and costly to continue business as usual. Best Care at Lower Cost explains that inefficiencies, an overwhelming amount of data, and other economic and quality barriers hinder progress in improving health and threaten the nation's economic stability and global competitiveness. According to this report, the knowledge and tools exist to put the health system on the right course to achieve continuous improvement and better quality care at a lower cost. The costs of the system's current inefficiency underscore the urgent need for a systemwide transformation. About 30 percent of health spending in 2009-roughly $750 billion-was wasted on unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs, fraud, and other problems. Moreover, inefficiencies cause needless suffering. By one estimate, roughly 75,000 deaths might have been averted in 2005 if every state had delivered care at the quality level of the best performing state. This report states that the way health care providers currently train, practice, and learn new information cannot keep pace with the flood of research discoveries and technological advances. About 75 million Americans have more than one chronic condition, requiring coordination among multiple specialists and therapies, which can increase the potential for miscommunication, misdiagnosis, potentially conflicting interventions, and dangerous drug interactions. Best Care at Lower Cost emphasizes that a better use of data is a critical element of a continuously improving health system, such as mobile technologies and electronic health records that offer significant potential to capture and share health data better. In order for this to occur, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, IT developers, and standard-setting organizations should ensure that these systems are robust and interoperable. Clinicians and care organizations should fully adopt these technologies, and patients should be encouraged to use tools, such as personal health information portals, to actively engage in their care. This book is a call to action that will guide health care providers; administrators; caregivers; policy makers; health professionals; federal, state, and local government agencies; private and public health organizations; and educational institutions.