Family Medicine Revolution: The Fire Within (in 3 Chapters)
Escape Fire If you like movies that tell a good story and you give a damn about the future of the U.S. health care system, I recommend carving out 90 minutes from the tyranny of urgency otherwise known as your life to watch “Escape Fire”. You have the option of watching it at your local movie theater or you could do what I did which was to rent it online and watch it whilst en route to this week’s hot, wonkfest otherwise known as the...
Battle Planning for the #FMRevolution: Strategic Questions
1. What tactical advantages (i.e., strengths) does your organization possess to be successful? 2. What battle vulnerabilities (i.e., weaknesses) threaten our success? 3. What do our troops look like – how will different membership segments be engaged in the battle? 4. What story/stories must we be able to tell to win the battle and to whom? 5. What skills will family physicians, and staff, need to win the battle? 6. With what other...
Our #FMRevolution Olympic Moment
In advance of last year’s AAFP National Conference of Family Medicine Residents and Medical Students (NCFMR), I blogged about family medicine and origin stories. My premise was that all heroes have an origin story and all family docs are heroes and so why shouldn’t we? In the process, I learned these pointers about constructing origin stories: Give us a reason to care Don’t make your hero a Chosen One– give him a chance to...
Admiring a Pioneer in the FMRevolution
Posted from Kansas City, MO In spite of the whirlwind of excitement, status updates and tweets whilst chairing the AAFP National Conference of Special Constituencies (NCSC) here in Kansas City, it was important to take a deep breath and pause to admire Dr. G. Gayle Stephens as he delivered his plenary session on the evolution of family medicine in America from counterculture to revolution. It was not solely because he is an original...
Why Understanding Newtonian Physics is Imperative for the Future of Family Medicine
Remember Newton’s Second Law of Motion? To review, force = mass x acceleration. In other words, to determine the force of an object in motion, an observer must know the mass of that object multiplied by its change in speed over time. Now, work with me. Imagine that the force is that which will shift a vector and that the vector, in this case, is the incentive system that drives rational physician behavior. At the present moment, that...