Staff Profile: Shari Goldston, MBA

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Shari Goldston, MBA

Shari Goldston, MBA, says the best part of her job is getting to see the growth in GME learners – from the time they arrive until they move on or even become attendings at MedStar Health.

“Watching them come in as interns and they’re nervous. Everybody’s had that experience, right? When you start your first new job, and you want to do such a good job that you make yourself nervous. Then, to see them six months later, and they’re confident and they know what they have to do…Watching them go through that process is amazing.”

Shari has been in healthcare administration for 24 years and, except for a brief stint at another local hospital, has worked for MedStar Health in various roles since 2006.

The fact that Shari left MedStar Health only to come back a few years later, she says, is a testament to just how much she loves it here. “I love everything about MedStar. I left and came back, so that definitely tells you something.”

In her current role as Associate Director for MedStar Health GME, Shari manages the Finance Hub for the MedStar Health GME Consortium, which means she’s responsible for all things related to the consortium’s finances – for instance, billing, legal documentation and affiliation agreements, management of Medicare dollars, and the scheduling of rotators to work at each facility.

Integral to her success at MedStar Health has been her ability to network with different teams and other departments and realizing that people are there to help one another. “You don’t have to know it all. Asking for help from someone else helps you build relationships, and it helps you to connect and navigate the system better,” she explained.

Shari is excited to see how MedStar Health innovates and changes medicine for the better in the coming years. “I predict that we will continue to be innovative in research. I think technology is going to help us in more ways than we know. To work with the physicians that are learning those new innovative things right now, it’s exciting, and I can’t wait to see where we go.”

Shari’s enthusiasm for the unknown might explain her love of Halloween and mystery and thriller novels, too. Shari is such a fan of her favorite author, Stephen King, in fact, that some of her collection is even autographed and displayed in special cases. “It’s so much fun. Sitting on the edge of the couch…I’m like, oh my God, what’s going to happen next?”

Leader Profile: Dr. Carrie Chen

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H. Carrie Chen, MD, PhD

H. Carrie Chen, MD, PhD

Carrie Chen, MD, PhD, chose to pursue pediatrics because it allowed her to think about health in a very broad way. The role you assume as a pediatrician, she explains, is so much more than curing or preventing disease. She says it’s about setting a foundation for a child to be healthy and successful over the course of their lifetime.

Although Dr. Chen is no longer practicing clinically, her background in helping others thrive has been a strength in her role as the Senior Associate Dean of Assessment and Educational Scholarship at Georgetown University School of Medicine. Dr. Chen oversees the development of curricula and assessment programs and provides leadership for medical student, resident, and fellow education. Dr. Chen is also a Professor of Pediatrics at Georgetown University School of Medicine and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

“When you think about children, there’s joy when they learn. People come to medicine because they have a passion for medicine. And in training, we sometimes suck the joy out of it, and it doesn’t have to be that way,” she said.

As an educator, Dr. Chen is always looking for better ways to do things and bring the joy back to learning medicine, asking questions like: Are there better ways to educate someone to help them reach their full potential? How can we make the educational experience a joyful one?

While much of Dr. Chen’s work directly impacts Georgetown University School of Medicine students, Dr. Chen notes that the close partnership with MedStar Health – where so many students go on to become residents – means that, “whatever we’re doing to make things better for our students will also make things better for all of our residents.” To further that work, Dr. Chen serves on the MedStar Health GME Consortium Graduate Medical Education Committee (GMEC).

Dr. Chen and others from Georgetown University also recently partnered with the Working Group for Racial Justice on a series of virtual workshops to educate faculty, fellows, residents, and staff on the basics and core values around creating equitable and inclusive learning environments. These workshops are meant to bring about systematic changes to address potential grading inequities based on student gender, race, or other demographics and combat deeply ingrained perceptions.

Dr. Chen says her talents for helping her students thrive, unfortunately, do not extend to caring for plants.

“I love plants. But I can’t keep any of my plants alive. I’m going to eventually kill off any plant that I bring home, and I keep trying,” she laughed. “Maybe if I actually studied and tried to understand the different plants and their individual needs, I’d have more success.”

People Profiles: Dr. Kathryn Kellogg

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Dr. Kate Kellogg (Emergency Medicine)

Dr. Kate Kellogg (Emergency Medicine)

Dr. Kate Kellogg (Emergency Medicine) loves to create useful and functional things for other people – things that they might need and that make them feel cared about. That’s one of the reasons she really enjoys glassblowing, a hobby she picked up last year.

Though she admits, with such a fickle medium, things don’t always work out as planned: “It is humbling, and it is really good for a recovering perfectionist because it is very normal that half the things go on the floor.”

Prioritizing the needs of others – particularly their safety – is the focus of Dr. Kellogg’s work as well. As Vice President of Patient Safety and Infection Prevention, Dr. Kellogg is responsible for creating system-wide processes and standards that keep MedStar Health’s patients and employees safe. Over the last four years, much of that work related to COVID-19 as she led the clinical side of the system’s COVID-19 response.

In a teaching hospital where the learners are responsible for so much of the patient care, Dr. Kellogg emphasizes how important prioritizing the needs of MedStar GME’s residents and fellows is to her work. “They’re such a critical group to have invested in safety and also to feel supported by all of our programs,” she explains.

Last year, her team launched one such program called HRO 2.0. In Dr. Kellogg’s words, it aims to “bring everyone into the safety journey with their everyday work.” Residents and fellows can find HRO information and patient safety resources on the HRO Hub on StarPort, including the Safety Moment Library, information on SafetyNet, psychological safety, just culture, and more. The resources on the HRO Hub, including brief videos, one-pagers, and presentations, are meant to support our work and journey towards HRO 2.0.

Also allowing her to stay connected to MedStar Health GME and better understand the needs and challenges of residents is her role on the Graduate Medical Education Committee (GMEC), which she has served in for several years.

In all her interactions with MedStar Health GME, one thing she’s been struck by is how deeply GME leadership cares about its learners, something that is very important to her. “I feel very strongly about the people that we work with feeling included and honored and seen as people. I think that GME leadership really does everything they can to help every one of those 1100 learners feel like they are seen as people,” she says.

Another aspect of Dr. Kellogg’s work with residents and fellows that she is excited about is helping this rising generation of physicians adopt a new perspective when it comes to patient safety – to create a shift from the physician-centric mentality to a team and system approach. “I think that there’s so much opportunity there. And the way that we approach our work is going to be able to be really different going forward than I think it has been over the last 10 years.”