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?
