Christopher Myers
Associate Professor of Management and Organization, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Joint Appointment in Anesthesiology and Critical Care Management, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Tell us a little bit about your research. How does it contribute to the overall goal of HBHI?
My research focuses on how people learn and innovate in health care organizations, and in particular how they learn vicariously from others' experiences to improve clinical and organizational performance in health care. I am also interested in how health care professionals develop leadership and management capabilities in order to most effectively navigate the business of health care.
What would you say most motivates you to do what you do? What are the goals you most want to accomplish in your work?
Effectively learning, sharing knowledge, and leading others in health care organizations are essential for delivering safe, reliable patient care. Understanding how we can improve these processes and create organizations that are better equipped to care for patients is incredibly motivating.
Tell us about a current project you are working on and what potential impacts do the findings have? What makes you excited about it?
Working with HBHI colleagues (Anna Mayo, Michael Rosen, Christina Yuan, and others), we are exploring the consequences of operating room (OR) team's individual and shared experience on their ability to deliver high quality patient care. Staffing OR teams is an essential management decision for hospitals and surgical centers, and the combination of skills, expertise, and history of shared experience among the OR team members can have a big impact on the outcomes the team can achieve.
Using data from thousands of OR cases, our team is mapping the optimal configurations of teams' individual and shared experience to deliver the best care possible.
What have you learned so far from being a part of HBHI?
The Hopkins Business of Health is a broad domain that involves not only the management of the "business side" of health care organizations (including not only financial management, but also organizational leadership), but also careful considerations of population health, how health considerations pervade work organizations, and how policy shapes these considerations. I have enjoyed learning from HBHI colleagues about all of these areas and expanding my own understanding of the many determinants of health that influence, or are influenced by, business concepts.
