Welcome to MedCenter Forum!

MedCenter Forum has been created to assist you in finding solutions to critical business questions, whether simple or multifaceted, that you may face in your academic med center. It’s also a forum to share ideas and opinions about various career, financial and managerial issues with a vast community of academic faculty and other med center professionals.

MedCenter Forum is NOT:

• A basis for clinical treatment queries or decisions or professional consultation.
  
  
• A fixed discussion that revisits the same topics week after week.

MedCenter Forum IS:

• Intended for use as a means to generate intellectual dialogue about day to day business experiences among academic medical physicians and other healthcare leaders and professionals.
  
  
• A learning tool and brainstorming resource for personal and professional growth.
  
  
• An academic medical community where new ideas are accumulated every day.
  
  
• A network of colleagues to assist you with similar career, financial and managerial situations they have encountered in the academic teaching and practicing arena.

This is a collaborative community where academic med center professionals assist their peers by sharing their experience and knowledge and answering difficult professional questions and dilemmas. Post a brief synopsis below, and invite your academic colleagues to offer their experiences and opinions. Before posting, please review our Important Guidelines.

MedCenter Forum requires minimal time away from work. Your participation enables you to:

• Identify lessons learned and best practices developed and apply these to your own practice or teaching department.
  
  
• Keep abreast of current career, financial or managerial concerns in an easily accessible manner.
  
  
• Join a panel of specialists who critically examine these issues and provide the most current information or situations they are encountering at their academic med center.
  
  
• Witness situations featuring real academic med center communities and health care leaders who have demonstrated business savvy responses to professional challenges.
  
  
• Ask questions and share best practices in a discussion forum populated by professional experts.

While we encourage thought provoking questions (and answers), at the same time we strive to be expedient, accommodating and considerate. The content has been developed to utilize the interactivity of the Internet in order to accommodate the needs of busy academic clinicians, teachers and health care professionals. The outcome is a powerful learning experience that is realistic and rewarding for all of us.

To further illustrate, here are some guiding principles to understand how MedCenter Forum works:

Guidelines for Posting Questions

1. If your question is general in nature, it may have been asked before. Please review the categories to ensure that your question hasn’t already been posted. If your question is different, please identify what differentiates it from a previously posted question. More academic med center online colleagues are likely to respond to an engaging, thought provoking query.
   
   
2. In composing questions, please provide enough background so your online colleagues can make relevant suggestions. Understanding that you may not want to provide identifying and sensitive information about your institution, we do ask that you please be sure to include a general description of your institution, location, clinics, teaching department and most importantly, your objectives.
   
   
3. Please don't post a question and then abandon it. Engage in a dialogue with your online colleagues who answer the question. Interact and convey to them what you think of their responses and respond to any questions they ask in return.
   
   
4. We ask that you please do not accept the first response you see that may assist in problem solving your issue. This will only end the discussion prematurely and prevent you from receiving other responses that could be extremely helpful not only to you but to other academic med center professionals as well. We ask that you wait at least 24 hours to give online colleagues in different geographic areas of the country a chance to respond.

Guidelines for Posting Answers

1. Please keep in mind that our focus in MedCenter Forum is to share our vast array of experience and knowledge in academic med centers on the site, so please always provide value added responses. This way other online colleagues benefit as well, not only the online colleague posting the question.
   
   
2. We ask that you please do not post your phone number, email address or Web site in your answer to a posted question. We will delete any contact information posted in answers on MedCenter Forum.
   
   
3. When you see questions that don't match your expectations of the objectives of MedCenter Forum, please politely steer the online colleague posting the question in the right direction rather than not taking their query into account or admonishing them. It's important that new academic med center online colleagues feel welcome and understand how things work. One option would be directing them to these guidelines to aid their learning curve.
   
   
4. If you post an answer to a question which contains Internet research and then you paraphrase the concept, facts or ideas you learn in your own words please provide explanation. However, we ask that you if you copy someone else's lecture, theories or writing word-for-word, it must not exceed 100 words and you must cite the source (simply add the hyperlink) like you would in any academic publication.

MedCenter Forum Code of Conduct
It is our great expectation that providing this forum in a Grand Round business like setting will bring together clinicians, researchers, and other academic faculty and other med center professionals who are interested in learning more about advancing professionally and sharing their knowledge with others. In doing so, we expect everyone to treat each other with respect. Inappropriate content or comments will not be tolerated.

• The Moderator of MedCenter Forum will delete any postings containing personal attacks, impersonation of academic med center professionals, profanity, discriminatory slurs, threatening language or libelous statements. If you see something like this before the moderator does, please contact us at once.
  
  
• Advertising, solicitations, jokes and chain letters are strictly prohibited.
  
  
• The cutting and pasting of copyrighted information without citing the proper source is prohibited.
  
  
• Posting of personal URL’s, email addresses or any contact information in MedCenter Forum is prohibited.

Questions?
If you have any questions or would you like to suggest an idea or change to the MedCenter Forum guidelines, please email us your ideas. We're glad to have you join us and we hope these guidelines encourage you to interact and share your knowledge with this new community of academic med center colleagues. We look forward to reading your posts in MedCenter Forum!