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Top Five Indicators Your Hospital is Siloed (and What to Do About It)
Silos are helpful for storage of things like grain, cement, missiles or anything else that needs to be separated from outside influences (heat, moisture, pests, etc). A silo in a […]
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Turning Safety vs. Profits Into a Fair Fight
Heart surgery is a complicated procedure done on unhealthy patients. Occasional bad outcomes are easy to understand. On the other hand, a bad outcome that was preventable is less acceptable. […]
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Why Do We Need a Checklist for Cardiac Surgical Cases Lasting More Than 6 Hours?
I am writing this post so that circulating nurses in the cardiac surgical OR understand the rationale behind my idea for “yet another checklist”, a proposed timeout at 6 hrs […]
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Beware of Automatic Decisions
In 1990, the Society of Thoracic Surgery developed a national cardiac surgical database as an effort to improve surgical quality. For the past 2 decades, extensive data has entered this database from […]
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The Robot Will See You Now (NY Times, 4/30/21)
Since da vinci’s robot was introduced in the 15th century, humans have been fascinated by the topic of robotics and respond with a mix of curiosity and skepticism, as illustrated by Ms Metz’s New […]
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The Value of Comfort with Discomfort
In the 1950’s, a psychologist named Leon Festinger studied the bizarre behavior of a doomsday cult called the Seekers that strongly believed in an imminent apocalypse. Once the date they […]
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On Becoming a Female Cardiac Surgeon
Since day 1 of cardiac surgery residency training, I have curiously noted that the personality of women interested in this specialty seemed a bit off compared to those with career […]
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The Downside of Hospitals Becoming “Highly Reliable”
Imagine you are a student watching a cardiac surgical case that went very smoothly with the exception of a few random episodes of sudden drop in the blood pressure. Each […]
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Learning From Other’s Mistakes
The purpose of this report to our team is to extract lessons from a recent safety concern at UNC-Chapel Hill that could be useful for improving our new hospital. UNC-Chapel […]
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Hospital Mismanagement of a Crisis: Common Themes
Most hospital administrators are not physicians and have no clinical background. They are selected as leaders due to expertise in management or finance. As a result, they don’t know how […]
Robert S. Poston, MD
Testimonials
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I’ve had the good fortune of working with Dr. Poston throughout my medical career. He works tirelessly for his patients. He constantly uses science to critically assess his own work and to solve clinical problems with the goal of improving patient care. He, in fact, may be his most scrupulous critic. I’ve personally worked with him on several projects to assess his outcomes, improve learning curves, curtail costs, improve team building and management and report those findings publically at national meetings and in peer reviewed journals. There aren’t too many physicians working hard to get that type of information out there. Of course, any innovation is going to have some controversy attached to it (if everyone liked an idea right away, it probably wasn’t that innovative to begin with) and the medical community can be particularly unforgiving in that regard.
Soroosh Kianni,