I Can’t Hear You While I’m Listening with Dr. Richard Baron

Dr. Richard Baron is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Board of Internal Medicine, and the ABIM Foundation. Prior to this role, he served as group director of seamless care models at the centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Innovation Center. Dr. Baron received a bachelor's degree in English from Harvard, and his medical degree from Yale. He completed house staff training at NYU's Bellevue Medical Center, and served a three-year commitment in the National Health Services Corps in rural Tennessee. Dr. Baron has practiced general internal medicine and geriatrics for almost 30 years at Greenhouse Internists located in Philadelphia, which pioneered the comprehensive adoption of electronic health records in a small practice environment. During this time, he also served as chief medical officer of Health Partners, a non-for-profit Medicaid HMO, and was the architect of the Best Clinical and Administrative Practices program, which in collaboration with health plans around the country is touching the lives of more than half of Medicaid managed care population in the U.S. As a trainee, Dr. Richard Baron remembers listening to a patient’s chest with his stethoscope when the patient began talking to him. “Quiet,” he said. “I can’t hear you while I’m listening.” The irony of his words was not lost on him as he began to ask himself some critical questions - what was I actually listening for? Today, Dr. Baron speaks to the vision of human service that brought him and many others into medicine. Yet as a student, he was taught that the core problem was the diagnosis and that the patient was a ‘translucent screen on which the real disease was projected’. And his job was to subtract the patient, make the screen transparent, and treat the disease. Join us as Dr. Baron shares his journey from rural Tennessee to Philadelphia to becoming a national leader --- pursuing one mission: adding the patient back to the center of medicine. Pearls of Wisdom: 1. Being a doctor is like being a police officer in that you are present during critical moments in a person’s life. 2. A patient is not a translucent screen on which a disease is projected. Instead of removing the patient and focusing only on the disease, add the patient, their story, their life, into the diagnosis. Then, treat the whole person. 3.  Instead of viewing technology in healthcare as an obstacle, view it as a tool that allows information to be instantly available. Technology was a response to many problems being faced. 4. The fundamental questions a leader should ask is: What does it take for a group of people to work together to take care of a patient? And how do you get everyone on the same page?