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The best professional advice I've been given

Credentialing Resource Center Connection, August 7, 2008

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Sally J. Pelletier, CPMSM, CPCS, is a consultant with The Greeley Company, a division of HCPro, Inc., specializing in the areas of credentialing and privileging.

Dear credentialing colleague:

Some time ago I was asked, “What’s the best professional advice you’ve been given?” No doubt, many of you would immediately have an answer. You can recall a specific event or mentoring moment from a colleague that readily comes to mind and that you’ve tried to emulate ever since. I could not come up with an immediate answer. This is definitely not because I’ve had a lack of excellent professional advice. To the contrary, people that I consider to be brilliant have blessed me with a myriad of first rate advice throughout my professional life. But to choose and pick the “best” advice—that can be very difficult. 

This week during my travels, I picked up the book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande, MD. Dr. Gawande has many accomplishments to his credit and is currently a general surgeon at The Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. I highly recommend this story about the drive that physicians and hospitals have to perform well, their successes and failures, and the struggles they face everyday. It was within this book that I discovered excellent professional advice for those involved in the day-to-day management of practitioner competency (credentialing and privileging). That advice is to practice diligence.

The Encarta dictionary has the following two definitions of diligence. MSPs and medical staff leaders are very familiar with the first. However the second definition should also set the standard for credentialing in your organization. They are:

• Legal carefulness: the care or attention expected by the law in doing something such as fulfilling the terms of a contract.
• Persistent effort: persistent and hard-working effort in doing something

It is this second definition that Dr. Gawande expounds in his book. He defines diligence as, “the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken.” He continues, “…diligence stands as one of the most difficult challenges facing any group of people who take on tasks of risk and consequence. It sets a high, seemingly impossible, expectation for performance and human behavior. Yet some in medicine have delivered on that expectation on an almost unimaginable scale.”

This message is universal. The lesson to constantly strive to do better without deviation and to learn from our failures can be applied to each and every task that we undertake to ensure that our organizations deliver quality patient care.

Remember, credentialing has no other master than the patient.

That’s all for this week.

All the best,

Sally J. Pelletier, CPMSM, CPCS
http://www.greeley.com/consulting.cfm

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