An Insider's Guide to Physician Engagement
Quotes and highlights from An Insider's Guide to Physician Engagement by Andrew Agwunobi — 1 passage I marked up while reading (February 2025). Everything below is taken straight from my Kindle, unedited and in the order I read it.
What this book keeps circling back tophysicians, office-based, executives, facility, fees and system.
All 1 highlight
Case in Point: A health system CEO faced the decision to either keep a service as provider-based (with higher reimbursement, because of facility fees) or make it office-based (with no facility fees, lower pricing, and less administrative burden). The physicians in this specialty were adamant that the service should become office-based because of patient dissatisfaction with higher copays. The executives, on the other hand, preferred a hospital-based model because a conversion to office-based would entail a loss of millions of dollars for an already struggling health system. Egos clashed and the executives and physicians reached an impasse. The CEO convened four meetings comprising the physicians and relevant health system executives. She asked the executives and physicians to not express a preformed decision. Instead, the goal of the first meeting was to collectively understand and agree to the facts; the second was to present any new information requested in the first meeting; the third was to share the different perspectives on the issue; and the fourth was to make a collaborative decision. Barriers gradually fell as the executives and physicians learned more about the issue from each other's perspective and the physicians participated in the decision-making process. The consensus? Make the service office-based with a commitment by the physicians to mitigate losses by increasing physician productivity and working with executives to reduce staffing expenses.
What I've written around this
Where these ideas turn up in my own work.
- Hopelessness KillsFrom that study we now know that hopelessness can kill. Homelessness is a crisis, and it is a crisis that need not exist.
- On Inequality, Happiness, and Our FutureThe exploiters of today do not own slaves; they employ and pay them. The exploiters of today do not aim to control the television — they instead put forth appealing new platforms.
- The White Man's Poverty, Pt. 1I grapple with the idea of inequality and the many crevices of human organization its various vestiges can creep into.
Read alongside
Other books on the shelf that cover similar ground.
I write about what I read — medicine, technology, and what holds up across centuries — in Side Effects. The essays live in the archive, and the rest of the shelf is on Book Notes.