“Raw” Curated Contemporaneous Health Care Case Study Methodology by Jonathan M. Metsch, Dr.P.H.

I taught full time in the Baruch MBA in Health Care Administration program from 1972 to 1975, then was a health care administrator for over thirty years, finishing for seventeen years as President & CEO of LibertyHealth/ Jersey City Medical Center, where we built a replacement safety-net hospital (it took 15 years), played a key role on September 11th, 2001, and once again became a medical school affiliated teaching hospital (having been free-standing for decades).
After retiring from LibertyHealth, I returned to the Baruch program for four years as Adjunct Professor and started writing case studies. I developed case studies based on my CEO experiences. Interestingly case studies on failures provided better Lessons Learned than cases on successes. I also used Harvard Case Studies, and invited “Visiting” Professors to present cases typically related to the new realities of Obamacare, mostly C-Level executives I was still in touch with from my first stint at Baruch. I was very proud of what they had accomplished and shared.
In retirement I have watched health care disruption become so complex that there are few, if any, up-to-date case studies. So I developed a method of “raw” contemporaneous cases studies each developed by curating news articles into a coherent thread, after a topic has called out to me. Topics come from navigating the system (think out-of-network physicians, for example), news feeds, and friends and family.
Now, my Career Capstone Project is to bring “raw” cases to AUPHA that can be used in real-time, meaning they can start a discussion for immediate use in class. For example if I was teaching now I would be doing a contemporaneous cases on the opioid crisis, tracking the implications of medicinal/ recreational marijuana, and the stealth plan to reintroduce Trumpcare before Congress adjourns for the mid-term election.

Here’s my way of developing a case:

A. Spend some time looking at the case format at https://doctordidyouwashyourhands.com/

B. To identify CCCS topics sign-up for daily automatic health care news feeds. For example:
1. STAT https://www.statnews.com/
2. MedPageToday https://www.medpagetoday.com/
3. Becker’s Hospital Review https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/
4. Healthcare Dive https://www.healthcaredive.com/
5. FierceHealthcare https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/
6. New York Times
7. Hospital Association Daily News Clips

C. Set up Google Alerts https://www.google.com/alerts https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/4815696?hl=en (for example: Amazon. health care; medical/ recreational marijuana; cost of prescription/ generic drugs; Ebola; Emerging viruses; flu; health care disruption; health care innovation; health insurance; hospital innovation;.; ObamaCare; opioid crisis; Trump Care; Zika)

D. Select topics to follow and make a folder for each (for example: Amazon+, precision medicine, Zika, marijuana, antibiotics; insurance; flu, hospitals; Obamacare/ TrumpCare; opioid crisis; prescription and generic drugs, right-to-try)

E. Then every day from News Feeds select articles on your topics and move them to the appropriate folder.

F. When you are inspired to write a “case” start a Word document, then go to the case folder and select key points from the articles, and cut and paste them to the Word document. As well capture article title, author and hyperlink.

G. Move the key points around until you have created a story.

H. Then label each point A,B.C…and move article title, author and hyperlink to footnotes at the end of the case.

I. Then write an introduction to the case.

Jonathan M. Metsch, Dr.P.H.
http://www.mountsinai.org/profiles/jonathan-m-metsch