Working to build a better future for healthcare!

Elizabeth Carpenter

Administrative Fellow at MGH

PGY: 1

01/30/2020

VBHC Journal Club selections

As an Administrative Fellow at MGH, I am afforded many opportunities that most do not get, let alone get so early in one’s career. The Value-Based Healthcare Delivery course is one of those opportunities that I am grateful for through my program. The course itself was o

utstanding with the renowned professors and case studies, but what stood out for me was that the course mostly comprised of physicians. As an administrator, it is sometimes challenging to collaborate and discuss emerging healthcare trends uninterrupted with clinicians.

The course opened my eyes more to the world of value-based healthcare. I now have an awareness of what I may be able to do at a lower level/smaller scale to start helping the organizations I work in moving toward a more value-based approach. Through all my finance courses in undergrad and graduate school, no one brought up the idea that we really do not know our costs. It seems bizarre that a mammoth of an industry like healthcare does not even know its actual costs, but this course changed the way I view the health care finance structures.

In the limited time since the course I had the chance to lead a journal club for current local administrative fellows and previous MGH fellows. It was my responsibility to choose the topic and find a couple of relevant articles for the discussion. I decided to continue the conversation about value-based healthcare since a good number of fellows also attended the course. It was great to get different perspectives from different organizations and talk about how each of us might help spur change. The discussion made each of us more aware of what little things we might do in our future roles and how we, as future leaders, can think more patient-centered and value-based. I know that I will look for a way to incrementally incorporate some of the practices I learned, such as TDABC, on small projects in the hope to grow more understanding and buy-in for value-based healthcare. I am confident that this course helped me view healthcare through a new lens that will make me a better administrator throughout my career, and I was glad to help spread the discussion to other early healthcare careerists.