Thursday, December 15, 2011

Here's the wordle for academic medical centers

Responding to my post below, a Facebook friend, Emeline Aviki created -- faster than you can say "AMC"! -- this wordle based on the missions statements from seven leading US academic medical centers.


She notes: "The most concerning words that are missing from this image are 'sustainability' and 'efficiency.'"

In a comment to my original post, Bruce Ramshaw offered a perceptive thought before he even had a chance to view Emeline's work product:

Many are learning the words and including them in their mission statements: patient-centered, world class, team-based care, value, quality improvement, etc. etc. But unfortunately, other than individuals leading extraordinary efforts (like Peter Pronovost and others), the academic medical center leadership and overall organizational design continues to persist in an increasingly outdated mindset, and in an organizational hierarchy with vertical department silos that actually prevents implementation of the improvements described by the words in their mission statements.

5 comments:

ShakesandStones said...

As a patient, I would like to see three words (or phrases) included:-

1. Patient focused - included as patient-centered. After all, patients are the end consumer and isn't health care about them?

2. Mental Health - Hospitals focus on the physical, NOT the mental. The mental wounds remain long after the physical has healed, especially in chronic cases.

3. Proactive - I would like to see doctors and health care professionals think outside the box in difficult cases, and not just resorting to conventional treatments for an unconventional diagnosis.

Just saying this is what I would want.

Kath Stevenson said...

As a teacher and student, I am concerned but maybe not surprised with the lack of focus on learning, education, educating...

Jim Conway said...

I life wordles and love academic medical centers. As I look at the big words, I see "care" "health" and "community." All great aims. What I've met is the gap between what we say and what we do. In the gap is the exceptional variation on safe, effective, patient centered, timely, efficient and effective.

For all of us, time to have the audacious bold aims of what we say be met by what we do.

Pat said...

I agree sustainability and efficiency are sadly missing but even more concerning is that “Patient” although appearing twice is only weighted with the fourth largest text font. If this is really a wordle with greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text – the lack of “patient” is appalling and inexcusable. Better that this is not sustainable!

Dr.Theresa Willett said...

I would weight efficacy over efficiency, at least in terms of a mission statement. What the wordle nicely shows is that empty words like 'world-class' and 'breakthrough' are just as emphasized as critical tenets of medicine: collaboration, compassion[ate], advocating.