Color coding your schedule helps a bit

Posted by Tom Vassas at Monday, May 28, 2012

My name is Tom, and so begins the first rotation.  I'm on my non-traditional rotation, Hospital Administration, with Dr. Lindsey Kelley.  As a heads up, my schedule this year (and where you'll follow me the next 12 months):

          1) Hospital Administration at UMHS

          2) Ambulatory Care: Internal Medicine at UM Canton

          3) Inpatient Cardiology at UMHS

          4) Inpatient General Med at UMHS

          5) Drug Information at St. Joseph Mercy

          6) At home! Month off.

          7) Institutional: Hospital at St. Joseph Mercy

          8) Inpatient Critical Care at St. Joseph Mercy

          9) Community: Independent at Chelsea Pharmacy 

The administration rotation is quite.....unique. On the one hand, you have the inexhaustible supply of meetings to go to, along with the millions of peoples' names you won't remember. Then there is the equally inexhaustible supply of projects to work on. When you get out of a meeting and have 5 minutes to spare, you really don't have 5 minutes to spare because you need to work on your projects! Time management is not only essential, it is the lifeblood of being a hospital administrator.

One of the amazing things I have been a part of from the first day is improving the logistics behind patient discharge.  With so many players, systems, and opinions surrounding patient care at our health-system, there is ample opportunity for the end stage to be go wrong.  Luckily, as I saw in many meetings thus far, there is a huge host of hospital employees who strive to make that flow of patient care and discharge optimum.  Much of this rotation will involve working with transitions of care, and the projects I am working on really show how essential pharmacy is in it. The biggest thing I took away from talking to other professionals and at meetings this week was simple; pharmacy needs bigger representation! A lot of this comes from prevailing notions prior to the pharmacy practice model initiative generation (PPMI), and it surprises so many other healthcare professionals to know how much pharmacy can help and what we already do to help. 

In the next 4 weeks I will get to share the various unique parts of this admin rotation and my thoughts on how the rotation itself will evolve. In fact I'm creating the ctools site and syllabus for it right now! Aside from that, topics like 340B pricing, transitions of care (TOC) and specialty pharmacy will hopefully be ingrained in the minds of my readers, so stay tuned.

-TV-