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Darrell G Kirch

Publications and source records attributed to Darrell G Kirch.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Faculty and staff teams: a tool for unifying the academic health center and improving mission performance.

The organizational structure of the academic health center (AHC) may present significant barriers to deep and lasting organizational change. The insular nature and structure often seen in academic departments and other units at AHCs result in competition for scarce resources, rather than in working together to add value to one another or to the organization as a whole. Successful unification around organizational performance goals is needed more than ever by AHCs as they struggle to meet their challenges. Over a five-year period (2000-2005) at the Penn State College of Medicine and Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, organizational inner cohesiveness was created through the use of teams that unified the clinical, academic, and research enterprises. Barriers that typically separate academic departments, such as a lack of understanding of the impact of organizational funds flow on each of the missions, were broken down. Traditional barriers between employees and management (e.g., poor communication, lack of clarity on organizational goals, and claims that neither side understood the other) were reduced. Problems that seemed to be intractable in the past such as an inequitable distribution of resources, responsibilities, and rewards, were solved through the implementation of a teams approach across departments and missions. The authors describe the creation and operation of these AHC-wide teams. The rationale for using teams is elucidated, the difference between teams and committees is defined, and data on five years of team performance are presented. The authors argue that the breadth of scope and comprehensiveness of the teams approach represents an effective model for implementing AHC-wide transformational change.

Academic Medical Centers↗
PubMed2005

The importance of anatomy in health professions education and the shortage of qualified educators.

The current shortage of faculty qualified to teach anatomy in U.S. medical schools is reversible. Sufficient numbers of individuals are in the pipeline to provide a future cadre of well-trained faculty members educating students in gross anatomy. The challenge is to realign departmental, institutional, and federal training grant priorities and resources, creating incentives for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty members to stay the course and become the teachers needed to educate the next generation of health professionals. These strategies include (but are not limited to) team-teaching gross anatomy, thereby distributing the time commitments of a laboratory-based course more widely within a department; funds made available from the administration of medical schools to allow postdoctoral fellows to participate in teaching and providing compensation for the research activities; using "mission-based budgeting" to specifically compensate for faculty teaching time; and, finally, re-instituting federally funded training grants that solved this same teaching crisis in the not-too-distant past.

Anatomy↗
PubMed2005

Reinventing the academic health center.

Academic health centers have faced well-documented internal and external challenges over the last decade, putting pressure on organizational leaders to develop new strategies to improve performance while simultaneously addressing employee morale, patient satisfaction, educational outcomes, and research growth. In the aftermath of a failed merger, new leaders of The Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine and Milton S. Hershey Medical Center encountered a climate of readiness for a transformational change. In a case study of this process, nine critical success factors are described that contributed to significant performance improvement: performing a campus-wide cultural assessment and acting decisively on the results; making values explicit and active in everyday decisions; aligning corporate structure and governance to unify the academic enterprise and health system; aligning the next tier of administrative structure and function; fostering collaboration and accountability-the creation of unified campus teams; articulating a succinct, highly focused, and compelling vision and strategic plan; using the tools of mission-based management to realign resources; focusing leadership recruitment on organizational fit; and "growing your own" through broad-based leadership development. Outcomes assessment data for academic, research, and clinical performance showed significant gains between 2000 and 2004. Organizational transformation as a result of the nine factors is possible in other institutional settings and can facilitate a focus on crucial quality initiatives.

Academic Medical Centers↗
PubMed2004

The future-oriented department chair.

The authors describe the current dilemma facing academic health centers (AHCs) as they recruit department chairs. In the past, leaders at AHCs predominantly were concerned with fulfilling the esteemed tripartite missions of patient care, research, and education. Today, their time and energy are occupied by a different set of tasks that have a distinct business orientation, including winning contracts, enhancing revenue, reducing costs, recruiting and managing a diverse workforce, and dealing with consumer satisfaction and marketing. New visions and strategies must be developed--requiring different dimensions of leadership. The authors offer concrete recommendations for recruiting, retaining, and sustaining department chairs, and argue that a deliberative, thoughtful process of engaging chair candidates should begin by focusing on the candidates' values as a first priority. Candidates who most clearly share organizational values should then be engaged in an iterative process of developing a shared vision, resulting in a letter of agreement that explicitly states the mutual expectations and commitments of both the organization and the candidate. Once department chairs are in place, ongoing development through leadership training, mentoring, and other investments help to retain and sustain them.

Academic Medical Centers↗