Why become a certified physician executive?

What is the CPE Tutorial and how can it help advance the careers of physician executives? This five-day program teaches executive skills that make physician executives more valued in the marketplace. When candidates successfully pass an evaluation judged by a panel of health care CEOs, recruiters, and Fellows of the College, they become Certified Physician Executives (CPEs). This certification provides recognition to potential employers that CPEs have: stature as a physician; been successfully tested in all disciplines of medical management; demonstrated management experience; and successfully completed the Tutorial with a five minute presentation describing skills and competencies on the last day. As CPEs become widely known in the marketplace, the designation will be a valued credential that helps physician executives get and keep desirable positions, as well as advance to the next level in their careers.     

What do you have to do to become a medical director?

Medical management is a large and growing profession. The need for physicians in management roles grows unabated in hospitals, managed care organizations, group practices, and myriad other environments. But entry is not merely a matter of wishful thinking. Painstakingly assembled credentials and skills are the order of the day. The advice in this column is distilled from Medical Directors: What, Why, How, a new College monograph.     

Important points in managed care contracts

Health care is increasingly managed through some contractual relationship. Such contracts vary and the contracting entities may be clinics, universities, health maintenance organizations, individual practitioner organizations, preferred provider organizations, corporate health plans, or other structures. It is estimated that within 10 years more than 70 percent of all health care will be provided through some type of managed care plan.     

Immigrant qualifications: recognition and relative wage outcomes

"One aim of this study is to examine the labor market outcomes of immigrants relative to the Australian born.... In particular, this article examines both the extent of formal nonrecognition of overseas qualifications and the indirect implications for wage outcomes of a lack of full recognition of qualifications. Immigrant relative wage analysis...is the subject of the second part of this article...."     

Marketable job skills for high school students: what we learned from an evaluation of After School Matters

This article summarizes findings from an experimental evaluation of After School Matters (ASM), a paid, apprenticeship-based, after-school program in Chicago for high school students. Analysis of quantitative data from a mock job interview revealed that ASM participants did not demonstrate more marketable job skills than youth in the control group. Qualitative data suggested that the nature of interpersonal interactions and the degree of professional orientation in apprenticeships contributed to variation in marketable job skills across apprenticeships. The article considers the perspective of human resource professionals who participated in the evaluation and describes an interviewing skills curriculum developed in response to the evaluation findings.     

Life-stories and storied lives: genre and reports of lived experience in gay personal literature

Personal literature may be written either as a life story such as an autobiography or memoir or as an autobiographical novel. Using the three volumes comprising the memoir of author Paul Monette and the three volumes comprising the autobiographical fiction trilogy of journalist and novelist Edmund White, this article explores the goal of each author for selecting a particular genre in which to write about lived experience. Each author enjoyed an elite education and came to adulthood in postwar America in the decade prior to the gay rights era beginning in the 1970s, and each writer participated in the sociosexual culture emerging over the succeeding decade. Each writer became HIV+ in the 1980s (Monette died of complications attending AIDS in 1995), and each writer experienced the loss of his lover to AIDS. While Monette and White each experienced the anti-gay prejudice of postwar American society, Monette's youth was less troubled than that of White who grew up in a complex family with a distant yet harsh father toward whom he was also sexually attracted. While Monette's goal in writing a memoir was that the suffering of his generation of gay men should be remembered, White's goal was more personal, choosing autobiographical fiction in his effort to overcome his feelings of shame about being gay founded on his desire for his father.