While I wanted to attend the party, as an introvert I usually avoided these types of events because they made me uncomfortable. Knowing there would be a lot of senior executives at this party made me even more fearful.

And do you even care?

The past few years have thrust healthcare into the limelight, with the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Healthcare Act (PPACA) in March 2010. And confusion has reigned ever since.

Once in a while, I come across good explanations that attempt to demystify the PPACA. As much as I'd like to be an ostrich with my head in the sand, mainly to escape the rancor and fury of those decrying the Act and the cries of those begging for meaningful change, I can't escape its impact on my clientele and readers.

For those of you who are interested and trying to make sense of the news, outrage and potential impact on your practice or executive role in a healthcare organization, here are a few of the more helpful resources:

1. From the American College of Physician Executives comes this video:

Healthcare Reform: A Spectator's Guide, by Sarah Freymann Fontenot BSN, JD. SHe concludes with a plea for "physician leadership, direction and well-educated voices" to help guide the debate and to produce the outcomes that really matter - quality, patient satisfaction, accuracy in billing, education and community.
This 47 minute informative video illuminates what's happening at the intersection of healthcare, the law and politics without taking any particular stand.  

2. From the American College of Physicians, An Internist's Practical Guide to Understanding Health Reform is a document written without legalese, accompanied by useful tables, plenty of useful links and even a patient summary. It's 109 pages long, so I don't encourage you to print it!

3. Finally, from the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions comes a document titled The Physician Workforce: Opportunities and challenges  post-health care reform. Here, the impact of PPACA is discussed on the physician workforce.

This is one of the most instructive parts of the document (the text is tiny but you can read the document at the above link):

The bottom line, whether you believe that the PPACA will hold up as being constitutional or not, is that the typical physician practice, as we have known it, is headed for change. As are the issues that physician executives in healthcare organizations must grapple with.

Are you ready for the ride? 

Happy New Year to you all, my readers!

I was bombarded with blog posts, e-cards and emails from businesses wishing me a happy holidays and even suggesting ways to enjoy them.

In the spirit of confession, while I appreciated the sentiments in these messages and had a few twinges of guilt that I hadn't blogged for over two weeks and hadn't crafted my clever or beautiful ode to the season, I wallowed in the sheer enjoyment of doing nothing, knowing that I'd pick right up when the time called for it. I knew it wouldn't make any real difference to the world out there if I didn't write, but that being available to my family and myself would make a difference to us. 

I hope 2012 is the year you would like it to be -- while you can't fully anticipate the content of the year, you can create the attitude that will permit you to cope with whatever comes your way. 

You can:

• create joy
• be grateful
• take things in your stride
• pause
• choose
• reflect
• seek to understand
• have fun
• cherish relationships that matter
• goof off
• make new friends
• dance
• celebrate life's occasions

I wish you a hugely rewarding and well-lived 2012!

Dr. Angel Garcia is one such a physician - an internist who is not only still in practice but who is also the entrepreneurial physician creator of an electronic medical record, and an author.

His book, Do No Harm: Saving Our Healthcare System, was written with the idea in mind of improving the doctor-patient relationship. He embraces the idea of an educated "patient consumer" and offers some basic ways in which patients can care for themselves at home with minor symptoms before rushing into the doctor's office, urgent care, or worse still, emergency department. 

He is also careful to paint a portrait of life as a doctor working under the constraints of the contemporary US healthcare system, in the hopes that patient expectations can be better managed.

Listen to my 20-minute interview with Angel Garcia MD in which we explore his entrepreneurial side. And then please add your comments here.

Barely 40, with a husband and four kids under the age of 6, Dr Bone was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer. As challenging as her journey was through the surgeries of bilateral mastectomies, chemotherapy and radiation, she never failed to exercise her powers of observation. 

Once she realized she wasn't going to die as she expected, she began exploring ways to put her new-found discoveries about the experience of being a "cancer patient" to good use. Her non-profit foundation, CancerSensibility.org (updated website coming) was her launching pad, followed some years later by her for-profit on-line store, CancershopUSA.com, geared to the support of patients with cancer, and their families and friends who loved them.

Listen to Dr Bone's powerful story as an entrepreneurial physician, still-practicing gynecologist, mother of now four teenagers, and cancer survivor with a distinctive take on what it means to have faced hell and lived with gusto to tell the tale.

When you are done, I invite you to share your thoughts below!