Physician Leaders Come in Unique Dimensions

One of the most motivating aspects of being a physician leader is the diversity in our work that comes through each day. This diversity is reflected in the range of topics that are encountered and the competencies that we need to bring to bear on a given problem or challenge.

All you need to do is to reflect on your work over a given week to realize there will be conversations related to patient safety, clinical care, employee or physician management that require your attention. Some of your meetings might engage in contracting conversations and contributions at the level of public health, while other meetings anchor us as physicians to individual patients and families who are interested in their health, health care, or end-of-life care.

Regardless of the content area, this breadth of topics also requires a range of competencies in the how-to aspects of our work. These areas include how to use data, evidence and emotional intelligence to advocate for a given position. At the same time, we must be experts in mentoring, advising, influencing and managing the next generation of our physician leader colleagues throughout their career journeys.

Here at the Physician Leadership Journal, we believe it is our role to provide a range of material relevant to the practice of physician leadership so that individuals can augment their individual library of content and competency as they see fit. We realize there are lots of ways that physician leaders receive and manage incoming information, and our goal is to assure we represent an important source of evidence-based, leadership content that can help to inform your work as a physician leader.

In keeping with this approach, this issue provides peer-reviewed articles illustrating the diverse responsibilities of a physician leader. One presents the necessity for physicians, physician leaders and physician organizations to understand cybersecurity, the threats, and the steps required to mitigate these risks. Another describes an approach to enhance the performance of the operating room through the use of Lean management principles: A third focuses on a clinical application—a novel tool for the stratification of risk for venous thromboembolic disease in patients receiving observation care. We also have a piece on an important, yet discouraging, topic for physicians, educational debt. We know medical education itself has changed, with a shift in the composition of graduates and increasing graduate debt. Given your roles, understanding the trends of physician practice type because of educational debt is important and can help to inform how health care is likely to be delivered, how physician leaders are likely to evolve, and how we can think about our responsibilities for the growth and sustainability of physician leadership in the future.

As you read through this collection of articles, we have carefully selected for this issue, I encourage you to consider its relevance in the work you are doing with your teams every day. Not just for the purposes of informing your own leadership strategies, but also in terms of the ways you can help to inform your colleagues, staff and others.

We welcome your papers for publication. To request author guidelines or to submit a completed manuscript, email editor@physicianleaders.org.