I spent my first real day yesterday, as a guest of the Institute for Family Health, as a guest of President Neal Calman, MD, and IFH’s patients and staff, who practice family medicine at the Sidney Hilman Family Practice Center.

The Institute is an organization that I have not yet encountered in the past - a highly functioning community practice, a network of Federally Qualified Health Centers, an active teaching program, a user of a state of the art electronic health record system. Dr. Calman is a founder as well as the President, and explained to me that he wanted to create a health system that blended the best parts of private practice and community-based primary care.

Part of my work is to bring up a new blog describing my experiences with these impressive health systems. That will light up at pchit.org in the near future. In the meantime, it’s noteworthy to say that I really enjoyed observing this practice, and it reminded me, in true LEAN (Toyota Management) fashion, that I can learn 10 things in 10 minutes, and the best way to take a history is to allow the patient to speak.