Author: Andrea S. Bauer, MD

Community

You Get What You Celebrate

It is a well-known business principle that “you get what you measure.” Any of us involved in pay-for-performance and complying with the various hospital metrics can relate to that. But recently I heard an interesting variation on this theme. On his podcast “The Tim Ferriss Show”, Tim Ferriss interviewed Frank Blake, former CEO of Home Depot. Blake’s version was “You…
Community

Collaboration in Science

On July 4, 2012, scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced they had found the Higgs Boson – a fundamental particle underpinning the Standard Model of particle physics. The existence of this particle had been theorized by Peter Higgs in the 1960s but was never “found” until the CERN experiments. This was a big deal for particle physics. The Standard…
Patient Communication

Patient Communication 101

When I recently learned that a friend of mine, Miro Kazakoff, teaches Managerial Communication at the MIT Sloan School of Management, I thought, “Wow, what an interesting job” and “Why do they teach communication in business school but not medical school?” Miro was kind enough to take me through a crash course in communications, which I then tested out in…
Work/Life Balance

Happiness in Hand Surgery

One of the main reasons I chose the field of orthopaedics and later, hand surgery, was that my mentors along the way truly seemed to enjoy their jobs. The hand surgeons I encountered bantered with their patients in the clinic and played country music in the OR. They ran marathons and made time to attend children’s plays and sporting events.…