A necessary supplement to patient care!

Mariel E. Bailey, MD

Resident in BWH/BCH Medicine/Pediatrics

PGY-3

03/18/2020

A typical day inpatient for the house staff involves caring for
individual patients' on teams and presenting medical information
to their peers 

I was thrilled to be selected for participation in the health policy and management course offered by Partners GME Centers of Expertise.  As housestaff, I primarily spend my time in the hospital or sometimes ambulatory clinics learning about specific disease pathology, the myriad ways the individual patient can become ill or become well.  I rarely get the opportunity to take a step back and think about how we as a health care system can adjust our infrastructure to better serve these patients as a whole.  There aren’t many opportunities to learn from the head of Massachusetts General hospital, or the director of Blue Cross/Blue Shield about the way they approach patient care, but the health policy and management course performs just that.  

By giving a larger framework for understanding what kinds of care our patients have access to, and how their care is paid for, I feel that I can now better serve my patients on th  Knowing more about how these decisions about distribution of care and funding of care are made helps immensely as we try to navigate this complicated health care landscape with our patients, and contemplate our role in changing the way health care is delivered in the future.

e front lines as they make complicated decisions about their own care. As trainees we spend more facetime with these patients than many executives and policy makers, and we view policy decisions and insurance changes through the lens of our patients in the hospital or in clinic.