Welcome
Letter From The Editor
We don’t build each issue of HMI WORLD around a common theme, but sometimes those themes emerge on their own. The theme that jumps out in the November-December 2007 issue is outputs.
Feature Stories
“World-Class” gathering for HMI partners, faculty, and community
HMI partners from as near as Baltimore and as far as Singapore converged in Boston at the end of September for a two-day global health forum focused on current trends and challenges in achieving health care and education excellence. The event, entitled “World-Class Medicine: Creating Clinical Care Centers of the Future,” was the first major gathering of representatives from partner organizations in HMI’s history.
More than 100 people representing HMI’s partners, affiliates, and friends in the Harvard medical community attended the conference. The sessions covered a wide spectrum of issues in health care delivery and medical education, from approaches to quality and patient safety to organizational development, recruitment and workforce retention, and systems and infrastructure development.
Rather than a series of lectures, the forum fostered an interactive dialog between participants. A common thread throughout the conference was the importance of viewing organizational changes, quality improvement initiatives, and even the development of new clinical programs and facilities as opportunities to change the culture of these institutions—or, in the case of greenfield developments, institute a culture of quality from day one.
Robert K. Crone, MD, HMI Chief Executive Officer, joined HMI Senior Consultant John Helfrick, DDS, FACD, FICD in setting the tone of the conference. Their opening address described the context in which many of HMI partners are working, and the progress in health care being made in emerging economic regions like South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Long after other industries have done so, health care is globalizing, and the potential impacts of this change on health care organizations, individual providers, and patients are just beginning to be understood.
John Helfrick speaks about medical tourism in this audio excerpt from his presentation with Robert Crone
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The speakers included clinical and administrative leaders from a number of HMI partners. Anil Kamath, Managing Director of Wockhardt Hospitals, Ltd. in India, and Meri Bahar, Director of Marketing at Acibadem Healthcare Group in Turkey, talked candidly about how their organizations—on their own and in collaboration with HMI—have worked to build their respective hospital networks. Dusdee Tongpuy, Executive Director of Nursing at Phyathai Hospital Group in Thailand, joined colleagues from Acibadem and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) for a panel discussion on the challenges of recruiting and retaining quality health care professionals. Other sessions focused on specific trends in quality and patient safety oversight, with faculty from BIDMC describing how their hospital has put in place new tools to help enhance quality monitoring and improvement.
Enhancing the quality of medical education was the subject of one interactive forum moderated by HMI’s Tom Aretz, MD, Vice President of Global Programs. Aretz and HMI colleagues Elizabeth Armstrong, PhD and N. Lynn Eckhert, MD, MPH, DrPH helped the audience examine changes occurring today in the structure and character of medical education. Peter Dieter, PhD, Dean of Medical Education at Dresden Technical University, presented during this session on his institution’s success in implementing a quality management program for its education programs.
“This conference was a great opportunity for HMI faculty and partners to mingle perspectives, talk about common issues, and share strategies and insight,” said Crone. “More than that, the discussions reflected a great deal of what we see happening in health care around the world, and the contributions from our partners demonstrated how these issues are playing out in real time.”
More Featrured Stories
New leadership for HMI
Andrew A. Jeon, MD, MBA has been appointed Acting President and Chief Executive Officer of HMI. Dr. Jeon succeeds Robert K. Crone, MD, who served as HMI’s founding President and Chief Executive Officer starting in 1994.
In Japan, TMDU drives to become “a university for society”
By creating more interactive learning environments, TMDU has enhanced the vigor and attractiveness of its education programs, positioning the school to excel in an increasingly competitive Japanese education market
Four-year collaboration enhances emergency medicine training for Italian physicians
Hundreds of physicians from hospitals throughout the region of Tuscany have completed a newly created emergency medicine training program that provides standardized training in this specialty for the first time in Italy
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Featured HMI Website Content
HMI-Wockhardt Interactive Timeline: Visit the HMI Main Website to view a new interactive timeline detailing the history of HMI’s collaborative partnership with Wockhardt Hospitals Limited (Mumbai, India).
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Around Harvard
Targeting pain management, treating muscle degeneration, and tracking the causes of type 2 diabetes. Also: a look at MRI’s emerging role in breast cancer screening, and other news and research from the Harvard medical community.