Author Archives: Arlen Meyers

About Arlen Meyers

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, an instructor at the University of Colorado-Denver Business School and cofounding President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs at www.sopenet.org. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ameyers/

How to Scale Your Culture

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How to Scale Your Culture

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Facebook, Apple, Boeing, McDonald’s and Starbucks are not the only high profile companies that have lost their way as they just got bigger and bigger. Experts and pundits will offer many reasons, some organizational and some more personal about the CEO and the leadership team. Just read the transcripts and review the videos of Congressional hearings about companies breaking bad as they are conducted, seemingly, on a more regular basis. Or, you can see the highlight reel on 60 Minutes or YouTube.

Most would agree, though, that a main cause of a company loosing its bearings during explosive growth is a loss of culture. The term “company culture” is something of a nebulous concept, but most culture professionals can agree on the very basics of a definition. In short, company culture is defined as a shared set of values, goals, attitudes and practices that make up an organization. How an organization goes about crafting its own culture is totally up to them .

In other words, culture is mostly about “how we do things around here”.

The US “healthcare” system is actually a dysfunctional sickcare system of systems masquerading as a healthcare system that includes academic medical centers, community hospitals, government hospitals and other health service organizations. Recent entrants include retailers, online vendors and pharmaceutical companies.

I have worked in many of these kinds of organizations. They all have a unique culture. Working in a VA hospital is much different than working in a for profit community integrated delivery network. In fact, one of the main causes of failed mergers, acquisitions or hospital consolidations is “cultural mismatch”.

The average tenure of a hospital CEO is 5.6 years with a median of 3.6 years. Very few (3.4%) had continuous tenure of 20+ years. Half (51%) had previously been a CEO at another hospital. First-time CEOs were often (57%) promoted from within their organizations.

So, how do you scale culture when the music stops for one CEO and starts for another as consolidation relentlessly surges forward?

Here is an anthology of culture continuity hacks:

  1. Forbes
  2. Harvard Business Review
  3. Bob
  4. 15five
  5. Inc
  6. What about scaling culture during the pandemic?

Some have observed that company culture is a reflection of the founder or leader. But, once the founder goes, pong, pool and picnics will only get you so far. Instead, many will get lost in the wilderness next to where you are holding your koombaya event including your investors and bankers.

I once worked with a Dean who remarked, “The problem is that we have no soul”

Rounding up stakeholders and getting them back to base camp is not something you will learn in scaling school ,medical school or your health adminstration degree program. 

Not learning how to scale culture, however, is career suicide.

Image credit: Pixabay

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How to Go From Nail It to Scale It

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How to Go From Nail It to Scale It

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

The startup journey is about going from fail it to nail to scale it to sale it. You have to:

  1. set up and fail at conducting the right business model and experiments to find a profitable and scalable business and economic model (fail it)
  2. fix what’s broken (nail it)
  3. then feed the machine so that when you put customers in the top, profits come out the bottom (scale it) or you create value for more and more patients.
  4. Then you decide whether and when to exit (sale it).

Peter Thiel, in his book, Zero to One, suggests that going from nail it to scale it will take having a:

  1. proprietary technology and barriers to entry, now and in the future
  2. networking effect
  3. branding
  4. economies of scale

Can you answer these questions?

  1. Can you create proprietary, breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?
  2. Is the time right to start your business?
  3. Are you thinking big and starting small, capturing a big share of a small market? Market share is the key to profitability.
  4. Are the right people on the bus?
  5. What is your innovation to market plan?
  6. Will you still be around in 10 years? Why? How good are you at seeing around corners?
  7. What’s your unique selling proposition, or, are you just trying to be the best of the rest?

What else? How do you get from nail it to scale it? How do you cross the chasm? How do you traverse the traction gap?

  1. How to build your personal brand.
  2. How to kill your brand
  3. Connect to the connectors
  4. Find customers one at a time
  5. Why coldLinking does not work
  6. What you won’t learn from Sales Navigator
  7. Build robust internal and external networks
  8. Partner up.
  9. Measure everything
  10. Have a digical sales and marketing strategy and execute it.
  11. Startup website basics
  12. The 7Rs of content marketing
  13. Why doctors are losing the branding wars
  14. The ABCDEs of technology adoption
  15. What you should know about dissemination and implementation
  16. How to sell your digital health product
  17. Barriers to AI dissemination and implementation
  18. What physician entrepreneurs don’t get about sales and marketing
  19. So, if patients are customers, how do you sell to them?
  20. What is the next minimal viable category? Have you identified a unique opportunity others don’t see?

As you can see, getting customer #2 (early adopters) is harder than getting customer #1 (innovator/evangelist). It takes people and systems, a sense of urgency, money and metrics. With so many employees quitting their jobs, don’t forget about the people who stick around.

Image credit: Pixabay

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The Academic Intrapreneur Dossier

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The Academic Intrapreneur Dossier

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Entrepreneurial universities and medical schools, as rare as they are, require intrapreneurial faculty i.e. faculty who are trying to act like entrepreneurs in their institutions. One way to recruit, develop and promote faculty intrapreneurs is to recognize their entrepreneurial inputs, processes, outputs and outcomes as part of the promotion and tenure process, which typically requires submitting a dossier to the promotion and tenure committee.

There is national and international recognition of the importance of innovation, technology transfer, and entrepreneurship for sustained economic revival. The Office of Budget and Management cites rising healthcare costs and the associate deficits to deal with it as a matter of national security.

With the decline of industrial research laboratories in the United States, research universities are being asked to play a central role in our knowledge-centered economy by the technology transfer of their discoveries, innovations, and inventions. In response to this challenge, innovation ecologies at and around universities are starting to change. However, the change has been slow and limited. Some researchers, myself included, believe this can be attributed partially to a lack of change in incentives for the central stakeholder, the faculty member. They have taken the position that universities should expand their criteria to treat patents, licensing, and commercialization activity by faculty as an important consideration for merit, tenure, and career advancement, along with publishing, teaching, and service.

Most dossiers require candidates for promotion and tenure to describe their activities in four areas: research, teaching, clinical care and service to the community. Most exclude entrepreneurship or do not give credit for entrepreneurial activities and that is a mistake, since innovation and entrepreneurship has become the fifth mission of academic medical centers. The new academic triple threat demonstrates leadership, innovation and entrepreneurship. However, there is a disconnect between how academic leadership is defined and recruiting, developing and promoting faculty with an entrepreneurial mindset.

The intrapreneurial dossier might include the following in areas of entrepreneurial research, practice, education and service:

Materials from Oneself

  • Materials that show your entrepreneurial activity

  • Statement of entrepreneurial responsibilities (course titles and numbers, enrollments, required or elective, graduate or undergraduate)

  • A reflective statement describing personal entrepreneurial philosophy, strategies and objectives

  • Representative entrepreneurship course syllabi detailing content and objectives, methods, readings and requirements

  • Description of curricular and instructional innovations such as new course projects, materials, and class assignments and assessment of their effectiveness

  • Steps taken to evaluate and improve one’s entrepreneurial outputs and impacts.

Materials from Others

  • Materials from outside sources commenting on your development as an entrepreneur

  • Statements from colleagues who have either observed the entrepreneur in action

  • Student course or teaching evaluation data

  • Distinguished entrepreneurship awards or other recognition of entrepreneurial abilities.

  • Invitations to organize or present at a conferences, seminars or workshops

Products of Good Entrepreneurship

  • Materials that demonstrate your effectiveness as an entrepreneur or innovation and entrepreneurship opinion leader

  • Patents or evidence of other intellectual property

  • Licensing agreements

  • Spin out or startup metrics

  • Economic development metrics

  • Failures and how you applied lessons learned

Other Items that Might be Included

  • Testimonials

  • Community service and ecosytem activities and accomplishments

  • A statement by the dept. chair assessing the contribution of faculty entrepreneurship and innovation to the department

Creating an academic entrepreneurship portfolio documents accomplishments, satisfies policy mandates and is a excellent tool for pacing personal development and entrepreneurial progress. Fundamentally, it should explain and document the value you have created for your institution by your entrepreneurial efforts.

On many academic medical center campuses, the emphasis and metrics revolve around publications and research grant numbers. However, the difference between discovery and value creation has little to do with money. Instead, it has to do with leadership, culture, strategy, alignment, coordination and execution.

Barrier to participation by academic faculty, particularly clinical faculty, in the scholarship of entrepreneurship are:

  1. They do not get promotion and tenure credit for doing it

  2. The main message is they need to generate clinical revenue or find a way to buy out their clinical time

  3. The other faculty in the department get resentful and see non-clinical activity as dumping more work on them

  4. They are seen as trouble makers and bad rebels

  5. Lack of institutional support, infrastructure and resources

  6. Rigid policies and procedures that are anti-entrepreneurial

  7. “entrepreneurship” is a dirty word. The scholarship of innovation goes down easier.

  8. There is little or no alignment with department chairs

  9. Lack of strategic vision

  10. No one is leading innovators. Everyone seems to want to manage innovation

In addition, edupreneurs, i.e. those education intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs developing and deploying educational technologies, are critical if we are to change how we educate students and change an unsustainable education business model at all levels of education, but particularly for higher education and graduate and professional levels..

Maybe, some day, promotion and tenure committees will include your intrepreneurial accomplishments and actually give you some credit for achieving them.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Innovation Ecosystems and Information Rheology

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Innovation Ecosystems and Information Rheology

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Rheology is the study of flow. There are many ways to measure flow. For example, Volume Flow is defined as the volume quantity that flows through a given section at a considered time interval. The most common volume units are:m3/s, m3/h, l/h, l/min, GPM (gallons per minute), Nm3/h (normal cubic meter per hour), SCFH (normal cubic foot per hour), among others.

Information rheology is the study of how information passes from the sender to the receiver, the resistance to that flow, and how to address it.

The concept applies also to how products and services flow from one place in the world to another.

A reverse innovation is any innovation that is adopted first in the developing world. To be clear: What makes an innovation a reverse innovation has nothing to do with where the innovators are, and it has nothing to do with where the companies are. It has only to do with where the customers are.

Historically, reverse innovation has been a rare phenomenon. In fact, the logic for innovations flowing downhill, from the rich world to the developing world, is natural and intuitive. After all, it is the richest customers in the richest countries that will always demand the newest technologies. In due time, the costs of new technologies come down, and incomes in the developing world rise. As a result, innovations trickle down. Right?

Be careful. The intuitive assumption that poor countries are engaged in a process of gradually catching up with the rich world has become toxic. It is a strategic blind spot that has the potential to sink an increasingly common aspiration: to generate high growth in the emerging economies. The assumption can even inflict long-term damage in home markets. That is because surprisingly often, reverse innovations defy gravity and flow uphill to the rich world. As a result, a defeat in a developing country half a world away can lead directly to a stinging blow in your own back yard.

How information flows, like on cell phones during riots and protests, is not an exact science. Percolation theory illuminates the behavior of many kinds of networks, from cell phone transmissions to the COVID R number.

Most discussions of innovation ecosystem creation and growth focus on the anatomy i.e. the components necessary to be successful. For example, one author describes the 5P’s of human capital:pillars, patrons, pioneers, professionals and partners.

However, equally as important is the physiology of clusters -how the cluster elements work together .One of the key determinants of an innovative organization or cluster is information rheology. There are three basic elements to the equation.

The first has to do with the number of nodes in the network, both internally and externally. Network theory tells us that the more nodes, the more value. Having one fax machine in the world added nothing. It took a lot to unleash the value , as the development of social media has exemplified.

The second has to do with how the nodes are connected. Some are robust and some are not. The connections between the nodes are called edges.

Finally, and most importantly, the two previous parts are not nearly as important as the velocity, relationships, acceleration and lack of resistance to the flow of information from one node to the next. We usually refer to this as a cluster or innovation district being “user friendly” and is typified by the free and rapid flow of information from one place to the next. Malcolm Gladwell described facilitators in the process as mavens, experts and connectors.

There are many causes of poor information flow, but, fundamentally, they come down to :

  1. 1. The sender does not communicate effectively or in a an appropriate way

  2. The receiver is unaware that the message was sent or does not understand it

  3. The systems for transmitting information and verifying receipt are inadequate

  4. Third party interference muddles the message

Poor information flow in sickcare results in dropped handoffs and referral leaks which are the primary causes of medical errors and waste. The lack of data interoperability is one of the root causes.

There are several kinds of intermediaries that facilitate information flow in an ecosystem.

  • Architects engage in strict agenda-setting and coordination activities

  • Gatekeepers support the knowledge extraction and dissemination of the information

  • Conductors take care of information acquisition, transmission, and task sharing

  • Developers create concrete assets for the network based on knowledge mobility

  • Auctioneers set the agenda and joint vision for the innovation network

  • Leaders motivate and foster the voluntary collaboration and identifying roles of network members

  • Promoter support ecosystem members to work towards the same goal

  • Facilitator bring together quite different, even competing, parties to work together

Whether it is making clinical handoffs better or improving the flow of information in an ecosystem or cluster, the obstacles are substantial and the systems for preventing information flow blockage need to constantly be maintained, which can be costly and time consuming.

If you want to accelerate regional innovation clusters and communities, don’t concentrate so much on connecting the senders and receivers. Focus on removing the barriers to the flow of information and how to push and pull it through the pipes.

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How to Close the Sickcare AI DI Divide

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How to Close the Sickcare AI DI Divide

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

The digital divide describes those having or not having access to broadband, hardware, software and technology support. It’s long been acknowledged that even as the digital industry exploded out of this country, America lived with a “digital divide.” While this is loosely understood as the gap between those who have access to reliable internet service and those who don’t, the true nature and extent of the divide is often under-appreciated. Internet infrastructure is, of course, an essential element of the divide, but infrastructure alone does not necessarily translate into adoption and beneficial use. Local and national institutions, affordability and access, and the digital proficiency of users, all play significant roles — and there are wide variations across the United States along each of these.

There is also a sickcare artificial intelligence (AI) dissemination and implementation (DI) divide. Infrastucture is one of many barriers.

As with most things American, there are the haves and the have nots. Here’s how hospitals are categorized. Generally, the smaller ones lack the resources to implement sickcare AI, particularly rural hospitals which are, increasingly, under stress and closing.

So, how do we close the AI-DI divide? Multisystems solutions involve:

  1. Data interoperability
  2. Federated learning Instead of bring Mohamed to the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohamed
  3. AI as a service
  4. Better data literacy
  5. IT infrastructure access improvement
  6. Making cheaper AI products
  7. Incorporating AI into a digital health whole product solution
  8. Close the doctor-data scientist divide
  9. Democratize data and AI
  10. Create business model competition for data by empowering patient data entrepreneurs
  11. Teach hospital and practice administrators how to make value based AI vendor purchasing decisions
  12. Encourage physician intrapreneurship and avoid the landmines
  13. Use no-code or low-code tools to innovate

We are still in the early stages of realizing the full potential of sickcare artificial intelligence. However, if we don’t close the AI-DI gaps, a large percentage of patients will never realize the benefits.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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The Dreaded Perfect Entrepreneur

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The Dreaded Perfect Entrepreneur

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

“Perfect is the enemy of good” is a quote usually attributed to Voltaire. He actually wrote that the “best is the enemy of the good” (il meglio è nemico del bene) and cited it as an old Italian proverb in 1770, but the phrase was translated into English as “perfect” and made its way into common parlance in that form.

Perfectionism is a problem. Here are some reasons why.

  1. It drives other people you interact with, who are not perfectionists, crazy
  2. We live in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world where there is no definition of perfect. There are only solutions we test until we find out whether they work or not and then change if they don’t.
  3. Defining something as perfect is a value judgement, not an absolute, Perfection is a pipe dream. As Psychology Today explained, “‘perfect’ may exist as a concept,” but it’s not a reality. After all, its definition is entirely subjective. “Achieving perfection” is entirely a judgment call, depending on who’s trying to achieve it and who’s watching.
  4. It could be a symptom of a more serious psychiatric problem like obsessive-compulsive disorder which is a personality disorder characterized by excessive orderliness, perfectionism, attention to details, and a need for control in relating to others. It is one of many entrepreneurial syndromes that are characterized by entrepreneurial psychopathologies
  5. Meeting the expectations of others to be perfect is bad for your mental health. It will make you unhappy.
  6. There is reason why the Golden Mean has been around for several thousand years
  7. Innovation starts with mindset Being a perfectionist is not consistent with revising the “good” with evidence based business idea testing results
  8. There are reasons why we say doctors, actors, athletes, lawyers, entrepreneurs and other service providers practice their craft. You never get it perfect, even if someone gives you a 10, or a Facebook like or an Oscar for your performance. There is always room for improvement, but almost never perfection. Failure is part of the drill and inevitable. What’s on your failure resume? That’s why, when it comes tapping into a source of entrepreneurial internal motivation, you should make it personal, but don’t take it personally.
  9. The goal of making something perfect or doing something perfectly will get in the way of starting something, like:
  • Business Idea: Instead of waiting until you have a complete airtight business plan, simply start your business.
  • Software: Instead of ironing out every last bug, release your beta.
  • Products: Instead of adding every conceivable improvement and feature, ship your product. Release improvements later.
  • Health: Instead of finding the right gym, selecting the right outfit and picking the right workout, just go for a walk.
  • Website: Instead of finding the best server, CMS, theme, appearance and font, just get a landing page up and start selling.
  • Email: Instead of trying to create a well-written and grammatically impeccable email, just get the message out and click “send.”
  • Value proposition and business model canvas: Define your underlying assumptions and validate them with evidence. It’s called minimal viable product, not perfect product, for a reason.

10. Underbidding everyone by making something “good enough for government work” and then submitting endless add-ons leading to cost overruns is a tried and true profitable business model and there is little or no chance you will go to jail or get fired doing it.

If you want to know how to get to Carnegie Hall, it’s just easier to practice, practice, practice and focus on the journey, not the destination.

Image credit: Pixabay

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What you should learn from the Google Health failure

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What you should learn from the Google Health failure

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

There used to be a time when almost everyone was asking, “What would Google do with sickcare?”

Google health has pulled the plug on their sickcare venture. So did Haven. So did Microsoft. Maybe if the folks in the corner offices (remember those) or at their beach villas working from home talked to some doctors sooner, things might have been better. You remember who doctors are, right? They are those people in the white coats who actually take care of the patients you are trying to convince to use your products.

However, Google, by no means, is getting out of the sickcare business. Google says it is ramping up its investments in health-focused initiatives even as it dissolves its single unified health division. They are reorganizing and focusing on other products and services.

What can startups, scaleups and other grownups trying to tame the sickcare beast learn from these megafailures?

  1. Know when to pull the plug and learn from your mistakes

2. Don’t make the two most common reasons why your venture will fail. Adam Bosworth, a former manager of Google Health, who left in 2007 before the service was introduced, said the service could not overcome the obstacle of requiring people to laboriously put in their own data.

“In the end,” Mr. Bosworth said, “it was an experiment that did not have a compelling consumer proposition.” In other words, it was a solution looking for a problem.

  1. Don’t buy into the myth that patients are good consumers and are eager to take care of themselves. Even when the relatively few patients do give DIY medicine a shot, to use a COVIDism, here are the perils and pitfalls.
  2. Realize how hard it is to change doctor and patient behavior
  3. Sickcare is a personal services business, not a technology business that happens to take care of patients.
  4. Patients rarely, if ever, want to pay for anything that has to do with their health if someone else will. That’s why everyone is chasing B2B models, like self-insured employers, instead of B2C models
  5. You have to offer a compelling value proposition to multiple sickcare stakeholders simultaneously, not just the patient, to be successful
  6. Follow the money
  7. Automate your technology solution so end users have to do as little work as possible. I recently bought an at home blood pressure cuff from an online medical department store (no, not Amedzon) that measures my blood pressure, tells you when the cuff in not on my arm correctly, measures pulse rate too, sends the information to an app for storage where it calculates the average of the readings, and allows me to send the info to whomever I want with the push of a big button , all for under $60 (no delivery charge). It even synchs to Apple health. The bad news is that I don’t want to use Apple health. I’ve done enough already.
  8. Be a problem seeker, not a problem solver
  9. Don’t fall prey to the distraction of traction.
  10. Constantly evaluate your underlying business model hypotheses by repeatedly testing them

The bottom line is that all entrepreneurs and new product developers have one and only one job: figure out what the customer wants you to do and give it or sell it to them at a profit. It’s too bad you can’t just push one big button to make that happen. Well, at least they didn’t call it Google Sick.

Image Credit: Google

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What is your sickcare technology burnout impact factor (BIF)?

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What is your sickcare technology burnout impact factor (BIF)?

Guest Post from Arlen Meyers

A group of former and current providers convened recently to discuss how digital transformation can be both contributing to and alleviating burnout.

Technofatigue, innovation fatigue and change fatigue are as ubiquitous as the Delta variant in unvaccinated people.

It’s time for sickcare delivery organizations to demand a burnout impact statement from vendors as part of the vetting, piloting and implementation process. We should call a time out to deal with the systemic causes of sickcare professional burnout attributable to technology.

John Elkington coined the “Triple Bottom Line” of People, Planet and Profit (also known as the 3Ps, TBL or 3BL). Up to today it is still gaining popularity and it has become part of everyday business language. All reason to be satisfied, one would think. However, despite its increasing popularity, Elkington has “recalled” the 3BL in a short article in Harvard Business Review. The reason, so we can extract from his comments, is the rhetorical misuse of the framework as an accounting and reporting tool, while profit still remains center stage.

There are many tools to measure the specific impact on people, planet and profits of a specific intervention.

The environmental impact statement (EIS) is a government document that outlines the impact of a proposed project on its surrounding environment. In the United States, these statements are mandated by federal law for certain projects. Environmental impact statements are meant to inform the work and decisions of policymakers and community leaders.

The Economic Impact Analysis (EIA) tool shows how your community health project’s spending on staff, supplies, equipment, and other expenses benefits your community. The EIA Tool can be used by any community health organization wanting to understand how its activities affect the community.

The burnout impact statement (BIS) would likewise outline the impact of a proposed digital health project on sickcare stakeholders, particularly end user sickcare professionals.

Some useful parts of the BIS process would include:

  1. A national BIS database
  2. An evidence based registry of results
  3. Including the BIS as a KPI during pilots
  4. Mandatory input by end users during the evaluation and vetting stages by care innovation centers
  5. A standardized pre and post pilot/implementation measurement tool
  6. A BIS adverse events reporting system
  7. A BIS risk management evaluation and mitigation strategy
  8. A patient engagement and communications strategy to clarify expectations about when, how and who will respond to electronic requests for information
  9. Reimbursement and payment for electronic communications and a new revenue model for responding to them. You pay more for same day delivery from Amazon don’t you?
  10. Creating third parties as data and information delivery managers or a data concierge service

If you are not burned out, digital health will probably make you cooked but not fried. Sorry, but EMRs were only the start. The bad news of the BIS requirement, though, is we would have to hire even more MD/MBAs, who left practice because they were burned out by technology, to manage all of this.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Why so much medical technoskepticism?

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Why so much medical technoskepticism?

Guest Post from Arlen Meyers

Medicine has transitioned from high touch to high tech to low trust. The explosion of post COVID technology “innovations” is leaving a wake of skepticism from the healing class.

As noted, Covid-19 let virtual medicine out of the bottle. Now it’s time to tame it. If we don’t, there is a danger that it will stealthily become a mainstay of our medical care. Deploying it too widely or too quickly risks poorer care, inequities and even more outrageous charges in a system already infamous for big bills.

Medical technoscepticism is driven by:

  1. Unresolved conflicts between the ethics of medicine and the ethics of business
  2. False promises and marketing hype
  3. Resistance to change
  4. Faulty thinking leading to technology adoption errors
  5. The halo from BIG TECH shenanigans and the resulting distrust
  6. Social media misinformation and infodemics
  7. Not addressing the needs of end user healthcare professionals and what they value
  8. Rules, legislation and administrative mandates and that interfere with dissemination and implementation and the resulting unintended consequences
  9. Inequitable access and lack of clinical validation to solutions
  10. Inadequate professional and patient education and training about present and future medical technologies and their value
  11. Fear about artificial intelligence and its effect on society
  12. Security, privacy and confidentiality concerns

The pandemic resulted in an increase in virtual care.  But its place and value in the post-pandemic world is up in the air. To help policymakers, payers, providers assess the  various ways in which virtual care programs could have a positive impact for patients, clinicians, payers, and society going forward, the American Medical Association and Manatt Health developed a framework. It can be used by care providers to develop and evaluate new digitally-enabled-care models, by payers to inform coverage and payment decisions, and by policymakers to establish regulations.

Much like addressing vaccine skepticism, technoskepticism will require a multipronged approach. . Maybe you should just take all those worthless vitamins and supplements and forget about all the technology snake oil.

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How to Conduct Virtual Office Hours

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How to Conduct Virtual Office Hours

Guest Post from Arlen Meyers

We have all had experience with various forms of virtual interactions, be they meetings, seminars, presentations, informal get togethers or virtual networking events. One form of that experience is office hours be they as part of a formal class or a more informal meeting.

In the academic setting, office hours are a way for professor and student to communicate outside of the pressure and sometimes hurried nature of a class. To persuade students to come to office hours, professors can invite students genuinely, and also post their office hours in a way that students can easily sign up.

The purpose of office hours outside of the classroom is to have a conversation about topics of interest and get to know each other better. By their nature, they are typically unstructured and open and require some moderator knowledge, skills, attitudes and competencies to be successful. In many ways, they are like a news anchor moderating a panel of analysts who are discussing a recent newsworthy event. The main purpose is to explore opinions and insights around a specific topic and inform, educate and engage the audience and participants. What’s more, they are a great way to include people with international cognitive diversity.

Here’s what I’ve learned about how to conduct virtual office hours inside or outside of the classroom:

  • Schedule them at convenient times and inform participants about the schedule sufficiently ahead of time.

  • Get to know the participants. Ask them to introduce themselves and post contact information in the chat box and introduce themselves. Ask them to turn on their video when they speak.

  • Clearly define the broad goal or subject of the conversation, but allow the learning objectives to evolve based on what the participants want to discuss

  • Perfect your moderator communication skills

  • Challenge participants with probing questions about controversial topics and explore them with follow up questions

In most Zoom office hours, 10% of the participants will do 90% of the talking. Prompted cold calling is way to engage the silent 90%, To avoid embarrassing the 90%, use the chat to ask them if they would be willing to comment. If they agree, then call on them.

It is best to have a “director” on the Zoom call who can direct traffic, deal with technical issues and questions so the host can focus on the conversation.

  • Be careful not to hog the podium and confuse your moderator role with being a member of the audience. If you want to add your two cents, wait until others have had a chance to speak and then contribute. Keep your comments short and to the point.

  • Be careful to stay within the allotted time, politely interrupt those who get on a soap box to allow others to speak, and let the audience know when there is only 5 minutes left.

  • At the end, summarize or synthesize the conversation and offer other resources or solicit them from the audience to post in the chat.

  • Invite a guest expert or key opinion leader to “tee up” the topic with a 10 minute discussion.

  • Try to make the sessions as Powerpointless as possible.

In short, invite the audience to discuss the topic, have the conversation, and then tell the audience what they discussed and thank them for their ideas.

I hope to see you at our next office hours on the First Friday of every month at 8am Mountain Time.

Image credit: Pexels.com


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