So long sweet summer

Ok, so we have passed Labor Day weekend – the “unofficial” end of summer. While the calendar says summer doesn’t actually end until tomorrow, the beginning of September is usually the time most of us think of the going back to school or back to work.

I shared some of my goals for the summer, for example my summer reading list. Out of the six books I wanted to read, I read five of the six.

The Talk Like Ted book was fabulous and I have already lent it out, especially if you do any presentations or public speaking.  The key take away I got from this book was the art of saying less but having a bigger bang with your messages.

I also read “Do the KIND Thing,” “The Vacationers,” “Beautiful Ruins,” and Sue Grafton’s “X.”

The last book I still have yet to read is “The Oz Principle.” Of course I picked up other books to read along my travels! I told you about “Touchpoints” a great management book that brought together so many of the things we have been working on as part of our management growth.

I also read "Every Last One" by Anna Quindlen which I loved and the "Beautiful Bureaucrat" which I hated.

My August was filled with travel — China and Japan you already know about, but this month also had two wedding back to back. I have now reached the age where my friends’ kids are starting to get married! Both weddings will put me back on planes to Florida and South Carolina. After doing the 13 hours to Asia, these are a walk in the park! 

While I didn't get as much relax time as I would have liked, I did spend a great deal of time thinking about the future. Not only are we working on the RWJ/Barnabas merger, we are also preparing to embark on updating our three year strategic plan in 2016. This is the time when we look both ahead and back. What have we accomplished over the last three years, what is left to do, and how does that fit with both what our families want and the current state of our health care environment?

You have heard me say many times that I do not believe the healthcare delivery system will look anything like what it does today, or in the very near future.

The minute clinics and easy access clinics are now on every major corner. I believe the next big thing will be the ability to make use of your medical information. While many of us have electronic medical records, they’re still not easy to access or are unavailable without going through many steps. I think sharing protected health information will become as easy as sharing access to an app with your provider – regardless of where you are.

The technology is coming too. Accessing doctors via telemedicine will be the standard, not the exception. While we and others have begun to dabble in it, it will be more common than going for an office visit.

So yes, I guess you could say I spent a lot of the summer thinking about how we will fit all of this in and what it will ultimately mean for our continued growth and efforts.

So how about you? What did you do or think about this summer? I would love to hear summer vacation stories too!

Summer vacation, had me a blast

My July 4^th weekend was perfect – sun, fireworks, and even the perfect amount of rain to cool down the heat of the day. 

I really do love summer.

My mom was a teacher, so she had summers off. So, we would spend a lot of time together during the summer months. There was always something to do, and she was a great partner in crime.

Growing up, we always had a big garden, and Mom spent a lot of time canning – you know, preserving foods by putting it in sealed cans. I am not sure that she loved to can, or if it was that we were on a fixed income and it was the only way we got through the winter months. Regardless, it was fun.

She would can everything from vegetables to sauces, but my favorite of all were the jellies and jams. Why? Well, there is something so fun about picking the fruit for the jams!

I remember when I was little we would go strawberry or raspberry picking. It always ended up with me bleeding because I refused to wear long pants and would get beat up by the briers. My mom would create competitive games for me to see who could fill up the containers faster, which often led to green berries being picked just to get the numbers. There was no quality control until later, and she never specified they couldn’t be green!

These times have always been times that I cherish.

We always took a two-week vacation the first two weeks in August, when my Dad finished teaching summer school. We would go camping in Maine and stop to see family along the way.

My favorite part of the trip was visiting with my father’s aunt in Massachusetts. We would eat seafood and visit cousins (and there were a lot of them!). As an only child myself, watching the brother/sister dynamics between my dad and his sister was always fascinating.

Camping in a tent, on the other hand, was a love-hate kind of thing. We loved it because it was the only way we could afford the vacation. However, there was always a twist.

You can’t predict or control the weather, so that always created a tremendous challenge. I remember being stuck in torrential rainstorms one year for almost all of the two weeks. My father told me if I cried to go home my mother would give in.

There was also the dreaded walk to go to the bathroom in the middle of the pitch black night to the one-stall bathroom. It always seemed like a million miles away. 

The priceless part, and the most meaningful part of the trip, was the opportunity to spend time in a beautiful part of the country with two people who I still adore to this day. We had fun, regardless of the weather or how long the walk to the bathroom was.

Playing Memory and Clue to pass the time. Finding shells and picking mussels for dinner. All of these warm memories make it difficult to resist jumping in when I see the kids playing Memory in the gym today.

So, what is your favorite memory of the summer vacations you took as a kid?