Diagnose Before You Design

Enthusiasm at the demo. Excitement in the pilot. Silence six months later. Two frameworks reveal why healthcare tech fails and what to do before designing solutions.

Design Your Schedule: Building an AI Assistant for Emergency Physicians

Emergency medicine scheduling doesn't have to feel like chaos. I built an AI assistant that understands my constraints and helps me generate optimized QGenda requests each quarter. This post breaks down the tiered priority system and skill architecture.

The Magnetism of Unfinished Work in Academic Medicine

Most of our best ideas live in drafts, not journals. This piece shares what happened when I circulated a rough AI-scribe write-up in our ED—and why making unfinished work visible can quietly transform your academic career.

Teaching Your AI Scribe to See: What I Learned in Three Shifts

Less time documenting. More mental bandwidth for patient care. After three shifts with an AI scribe, I've experienced a fundamental shift in practice. This guide shares practical communication strategies that don't just improve charting—they make you a better physician.

Scaling Innovation: The Compounding Effects of Institutional Culture

Discover how human-centered design transforms communication in medicine, from personal mastery to institutional culture change.

The P3 Framework for Medical Presentations — How Message, Media, and Delivery Multiply to Drive Engagement and Learning

Transform medical presentations with the P3 Framework: Message, Media, and Delivery. Practical steps + worksheet to boost clarity and engagement.

The Five Design Mindsets That Transform Medical Communication

Discover 5 proven mindsets that turn EM presentations into engaging, behavior-changing sessions. Includes a real case study + free quick reference card.

The Art of Conveying Health Information

Stop treating presentations like information transfer. Start designing them for behavior change. Here's how emergency medicine can lead healthcare communication transformation.

How I Use AI to Enhance My Academic Career (Written By An Academic Physician)

Discover how AI tools like ChatGPT transform academic medicine by enhancing productivity, reducing administrative burdens, and fostering innovation. Explore practical AI applications to streamline your academic career.

The Emergency Department: A Safety Net or a Buffer?

Emergency Departments (EDs) are strained, acting as buffers due to patient boarding and system stress. Rethinking the healthcare system, creating resilience and proper slack can alleviate ED burden.

How to Prioritize Writing in the Busy Life of an Academic Emergency Physician

Boost your academic writing as a physician with daily habits. Learn to balance patient care and scholarly work, prioritize quality, and leverage writing accountability groups for success.

The Role of Human Factors in Creating Effective Solutions

Explore the key to success in innovation: the difference between efficacy and effectiveness. Learn about human-centered design and inclusivity in turning great ideas into real-world solutions with inspiring examples from OXO and more.

Learning

Beyond the Mean: Encouraging Risk-Taking in Education and Health Professions

This post explores a human-centered approach to designing a path to health professions. Discover the importance of new ways of thinking, building self-efficacy, and the power of role models.

Learning

Turning Content into Knowledge - Leveraging FOAMed for Lifelong Learning in Medicine

A personal knowledge management system is key for physicians to stay current, make connections, and create new knowledge that can shape the future. With the right tools and approach, physicians can learn to think differently and become creators of knowledge that can have an impact.

Resources - Turning Content Into Knowledge

This is a collection of the tools and resources I've found to be most useful in building your Personal Knowledge Management System. I get nothing from any of these. 🖥️CURATED FOAMed & QUALITY EVALUATION TOOLSSocial Media Index (SMi)Social Media IndexALiEMBrent Thoma, MD MAHome - The METRIQ StudyWe

Design

Create value with an innovative mindset

Being innovative is about knowing how to create value for others. Design is the link to get you there.

Design

Use Design to Put out the Fire: protecting against burnout in medicine

Thinking like a designer unlocks tools to create systems within the constraints of life.

Design

Rock gardens, pandas and bonsai: focus on the details to cultivate what matters

To appreciate the end result, you have to focus on the details. The process is more important than the end result.

Emergency Medicine

A thousand cuts to our healthcare system.

The downfall of our healthcare system won't be a swift, dramatic event - it's a slow process of 1000s of insults over time. I'm worried omicron is the last straw.

Mindless Meditations: Your morning routine might be a waste of time.

It had been over 400 days. Every day I would sit and experience my mind. I've been interested in meditation since I was an undergraduate. Having been studying the brain when meditation was gaining popularity and sharing a campus with Richie Davidson [https://centerhealthyminds.org], the world-famous neuroscientist

Design

How to be anti-disciplinary [how to have ideas] \\ conclusion

Having ideas is the easy part. Having a system to actually carry them through is where you earn your keeps.

Learning

How to be anti-disciplinary [the pinnacle]

The pinnacle; where purpose and passion intersect. I realize I exist at points between interdisciplinarities.

Learning

How to be anti-disciplinary [integration]

Use new experiences to compare and contrast old to create a unique perspective. You create value for others by integrating what you do and see.

Learning

How to be anti-disciplinary [the come up]

Our early life experiences help form your interpretation of the world around you through life. Here's how they affected mine.