Tips on Mentorship (a conversation)

The PAC mentor program

I recently had the chance to sit down with David Bar-Shain MD, of MetroHealth, who single-handedly started the a mentorship program in the PAC (Physician Advisory Council), hosted at Epic in Verona Wisconsin.

The program has been running for 4 years now and has matched over 70 mentor-mentee pairs, over 170 people involved, supporting young physician and APP informaticists by matching them with mid- and late-career informaticists (and some who serve as both mentee and mentor!).

We recently had a chance at the Epic 2022 User Group Meeting to sit and chat about the fundamentals of mentorship, and what I find interesting and fun about being a mentor.

What did we talk about?

  • The importance of having more than one mentor
  • Mutual curiosity: telling our own journeys
  • Who sets the agenda for our meeting?
  • War stories and are they appropriate?
  • 1-pagers
  • Storytelling
  • 80:20 rule of informatics: socio-political vs technical skill
  • Book club and leadership
  • Learning from outside of healthcare
  • Mentorship is about asking open ended questions
  • 3 psychological principles that apply to therapy as well as mentorship
  • Rowing downstream, not upstream
  • Advocacy, offering connections from your network
  • Peer mentorship
  • Blind spotting
  • Validation and encouragement
  • Lateral thinking
  • The Failure Resume

Here’s the audio-only interview (33 minutes).

CMIO’s take? Let us know what you think! From YOUR experience as a mentor or mentee, what have YOU learned?

Author: CT Lin

CMIO, UCHealth (Colorado); Professor, University of Colorado School of Medicine

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