Improving Clinician Well-being and Patient Safety Through Human-Centered Design.

This Viewpoint discusses the need for clinicians to be involved in every stage of the development of patient safety interventions in order to not only improve patient care, but also maximize the interventions' effectiveness and ensure clinician well-being and buy-in.

Covid-19 has made clear why all physicians need to know about the business of healthcare

Amid longstanding recognition that healthcare challenges are often managerial, not just clinical, many have called for greater attention to developing physicians? business management abilities. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has amplified the urgency of building physicians? business knowledge and skills?from understanding health economics and finances to managing dynamics of collaborative leadership and change?in order to respond to pandemic-induced business challenges that threaten healthcare organizations. Unfortunately, existing efforts to develop these critical skills among physicians remain limited, focusing primarily on early-career physicians-in-training or later-career physicians in formal leadership positions. These efforts leave a wide swath of frontline physician leaders ?in the middle? without systematic resources for developing their business management abilities. We advocate for several key changes to professional practices and policies to help bring business of health knowledge and skills to the foreground for all physicians, both in the pandemic and beyond.

Operational Recommendations for Scarce Resource Allocation in a Public Health Crisis.

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic may require rationing of various medical resources if demand exceeds supply. Theoretical frameworks for resource allocation have provided much needed ethical guidance, but hospitals still need to address objective practicalities and legal vetting to operationalize scarce resource allocation schemata. To develop operational scarce resource allocation processes for public health catastrophes, including the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, five health systems in Maryland formed a consortium-with diverse expertise and representation-representing more than half of all hospitals in the state. Our efforts built on a prior statewide community engagement process that determined the values and moral reference points of citizens and health-care professionals regarding the allocation of ventilators during a public health catastrophe. Through a partnership of health systems, we developed a scarce resource allocation framework informed by citizens' values and by general expert consensus. Allocation schema for mechanical ventilators, ICU resources, blood components, novel therapeutics, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and renal replacement therapies were developed. Creating operational algorithms for each resource posed unique challenges; each resource's varying nature and underlying data on benefit prevented any single algorithm from being universally applicable. The development of scarce resource allocation processes must be iterative, legally vetted, and tested. We offer our processes to assist other regions that may be faced with the challenge of rationing health-care resources during public health catastrophes.