Tony Reed, MD, MBA, CPE, serves as the Associate Chief Medical Officer at Temple University in Philadelphia.
On May 10th, Dr. Tony Reed will present at Becker's Health IT + Clinical Leadership 2018. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place May 10-11th 2018 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Dr. Reed's session, click here.
Question: Describe one of your best colleagues. What it is that person does/brings that makes them indispensable to your organization?
Dr. Tony Reed: I have two colleagues who immediately come to mind. One assumed responsibility for a very large training program last year, and the other one agreed to an interim role in our hospital last month. Both have been with the organization for several years. One trained with us, and the other started here as an attending physician. Both display the behavioral and tactile attributes of transformational leadership and have high levels of emotional intelligence. The two of them drive forward the mission of the hospital by partnering with hospital leadership to build bridges to the training programs, the physician group and the medical school. They understand the differential pressures of academic medicine and hospital efficiency. Moreover, they each have found a way to explain the synergy of value-based care delivery with academia in an urban, underserved setting.
Q: When was the last time your organization responded to concerns or needs expressed by physicians? What unfolded?
TR: Yesterday. We are a physician-led organization with dyadic and triadic partnerships in everything we do. One month, we noticed an increase in hospital-acquired infections. The physician-nurse leadership team surveyed physicians, nurses and others for ideas on the cause. They performed root cause analyses on the cases and discussed the findings widely.
Yesterday, a physician noted he couldn't get insurance coverage for outpatient acute dialysis. Our care resource management and finance teams worked together with our vice president of integration to affect change in the payer coverage of the service. The physician was able to discharge the patient later in the day.
Q: How do you define patient engagement?
TR: Educated consumers — on service, on quality and on price. Modern patients appropriately demand to know everything about their options up front. What will be done? How long will it take? What are alternative choices? How much will it cost? These questions did not get asked when I started practice 20 years ago. It's a great change. I have found partners in care and enjoy practice more when patients come to a visit having done their own research. We search the internet together during the visit, and I make myself generally aware of the first several search engine hits for most of the common conditions I treat.
I have been involved in the development of many apps over the past 5 years. Each time, we work to integrate patient education with tools to manage their own care, as well as resource information such as our contact information.