Why ERthink ?
20 years of practicing medicine has taught me that my decision making skills are far more important than my knowledge base. Rare signs and symptoms, long lists of diagnostic criteria, interpretation of lab results--can all be looked up in a medical library, which of course has now been replaced by the PDA and the Web. However, the physician still remains responsible for the decision making process--responsible for all of the pitfalls and inherent weaknesses in our human decision making skills.
ERthink seminar, evolved from a collection of quirky, unique "rules" that I created over the course of my career. The original "rules" were designed as short phrases, or simply one word, that would trigger a decision making pathway. They were intentionally designed to be short, and bizarre enough, that they could easily be taken off the dusty shelves in my brain. Ideally they would act as mental drop down menus that would hopefully appear just at the time I needed help in avoiding a hauntingly bad critical decision path. To be useful they needed to be simple, short, and rapidly retrievable.
The Columbia Shuttle disaster of 2003 was a turning point in my thinking about "thinking". I wanted to formalize my rules so that I could avoid "Shuttle Thinking" -- If the best and brightest men and women of NASA could make a bad critical decision, what hope was there for me, an ER physician, faced with one critical decision after another during a sleep deprived 48 hour shift in the ER? The Columbia Shuttle disaster forced me to take a long hard look at how I made decisions --- how could I improve my decision making skills? That was the genesis of what has now become ERthink.
As I transitioned from medicine to business, I realized that my black bag of medical decision skills, which I credit for allowing me to retire from medicine free of malpractice suits, were directly transferable to the world of business. One day in early 2007, 2 years after retiring from active medicine, I sat down, and jotted down a list of all of the "rules" I had generated over the years. I was surprised by the length of the list. The "rules" have been condensed into 5 skill sets, which have now been formally organized into the ERthink seminar.
20 years of practicing medicine has taught me that my decision making skills are far more important than my knowledge base. Rare signs and symptoms, long lists of diagnostic criteria, interpretation of lab results--can all be looked up in a medical library, which of course has now been replaced by the PDA and the Web. However, the physician still remains responsible for the decision making process--responsible for all of the pitfalls and inherent weaknesses in our human decision making skills.
ERthink seminar, evolved from a collection of quirky, unique "rules" that I created over the course of my career. The original "rules" were designed as short phrases, or simply one word, that would trigger a decision making pathway. They were intentionally designed to be short, and bizarre enough, that they could easily be taken off the dusty shelves in my brain. Ideally they would act as mental drop down menus that would hopefully appear just at the time I needed help in avoiding a hauntingly bad critical decision path. To be useful they needed to be simple, short, and rapidly retrievable.
The Columbia Shuttle disaster of 2003 was a turning point in my thinking about "thinking". I wanted to formalize my rules so that I could avoid "Shuttle Thinking" -- If the best and brightest men and women of NASA could make a bad critical decision, what hope was there for me, an ER physician, faced with one critical decision after another during a sleep deprived 48 hour shift in the ER? The Columbia Shuttle disaster forced me to take a long hard look at how I made decisions --- how could I improve my decision making skills? That was the genesis of what has now become ERthink.
As I transitioned from medicine to business, I realized that my black bag of medical decision skills, which I credit for allowing me to retire from medicine free of malpractice suits, were directly transferable to the world of business. One day in early 2007, 2 years after retiring from active medicine, I sat down, and jotted down a list of all of the "rules" I had generated over the years. I was surprised by the length of the list. The "rules" have been condensed into 5 skill sets, which have now been formally organized into the ERthink seminar.
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