Great news!  If you missed LUGPA's Rising Chief Resident Summit, the meeting is available to view On Demand.  

The event, designed specifically for PGY4 and 5 urology residents, took place August 20, 2020. Speakers covered crucial topics from vetting employment contracts to early-career financial management and other issues geared for resident physicians during their transition to full-time practice.

Access to the sessions is free.  If you did not previously register to attend the live event, you will be asked to register. If you already registered, you do not have to register again, instead, be sure to click on the "Already Registered?" button. 

Click here to begin.  

Residents Impressed with Virtual Job Fair 

	Dr. Acquaye

LUGPA's Virtual Job Fair took place in conjunction with the Rising Chief Resident Summit on Aug. 20, 2020.

Residents who attended had access to more than 20 of LUGPA's most prominent practices from throughout the US – all of whom were hiring.

"I attended the virtual job fair," said Joseph Acquaye, MD, resident at the University of Minnesota. "I was very impressed by the user friendly interface, the ease with which I could check details of the positions (for the most part) and the ability to ask some preliminary questions via chat and then follow up with zoom where I saw fit.

"Having my resume available with the click of a button was also very helpful. I connected with one potential employer with whom I'll be moving forward with a formal interview. It was a great experience and a great alternative to the in-person set up."   

Residents were able to create their own profile, upload CVs, and schedule live chats with urology practices in their area. 

Want to be a part of next year's event?  If you are not the direct recipient of this e-mail, or if you change your e-mail address, sign up for future issues of LUGPA's Resident Newsletter here.  

How Overachievers Adapt to Clinical Practice 

by Mara R. Holton, MD

	Dr. Holton

I see you, Hermione Granger, with your hand confidently raised.  I hear you, Sheldon Cooper, exclaiming “bazinga!” at your achievement.  I concede to you, Lisa Simpson, on yet another point.  You are successful and driven people and part of that reward has always been derived from grades, achievements, honors & awards; the acknowledgment that you have, yet again, overachieved.  Certainly, the accolades were fewer and farther between after your medical school graduation, but they were still available for the strivers:  fellowships, first authorships, intern/resident of the year awards.  Your natural curiosity and desire to help led you to medicine and there were, no doubt, significant challenges as you developed your urologic knowledge and skill set, but the path was paved with summative assessments.

Clinical practice is different. You have earned the right to practice the craft you worked so tirelessly to master, but there are no professors lauding your work, no chiefs grudgingly acknowledging your skill, and no doe-eyed medical students or interns to impress.  It is just you, your knowledge, and your patient.  This is not to say it is thankless.  It absolutely is not, but it is not graded in any way approaching what you have experienced to this date. 

And yet, your patients and your colleagues deserve someone who continues to strive even in the absence of gold stars.  Whether it is continued accretion of novel surgical techniques, research projects, training residents, advocacy for a patient group or population about which you care deeply, it is absolutely essential to identify and find those opportunities for growth which rebuild and restore. 

So, how does one whose achievements have been weighed since early childhood transition to this new world?   

There are 3 paths that I discern, with a little bit of overlap for most:

1. Learning for learning’s sake.
2. Do it for them.
3. Fake it.

The first path suits the most curious among us.  The folks who love to learn new skills and practice them, the people who took up guitar during the pandemic and spend Saturday mornings reading arcane scientific journals.  This is to say, a few of us, and those people will be fine without my advice.

The second path is, of course, the altruistic: those who are motivated exclusively or predominantly by the reward doing good for others – they will be incented by a desire to be a competent and compassionate physician to their patients and a good resource and partner to their colleagues. Many of us who pursue medicine fit into this larger category. These are team players who should focus on finding a situation that plays to these priorities and a niche within practice that nurtures these instincts. 

The third path is simple.  Pretend that there is an evaluation, a grade, and an award given out and then do what you’ve trained yourself to do, and just get the A.  Learn, expand your mind, gain new skills and give yourself the As.  They never actually matter, but they certainly were useful weren’t they? I promise you, if you convince yourself that mentoring is something you can major in, it will be easier to get yourself up on a Saturday morning to sit with a young person and discuss their career. 

And, at the end of all this, it might turn out that there is a love of learning and altruism in there too.  

Dr. Fakhoury Receives Resident Innovation Award  

	Dr. Fakhoury

LUGPA is proud to name Mathew Fakhoury, DO, as the winner of the 2020 Resident Clinical Innovation Award. 

“I am incredibly honored to receive this award,” said Dr. Fakhoury, a resident at Cook County Urology in Chicago, IL. “I sincerely appreciate the opportunity LUGPA has provided residents and fellows to showcase their work and contributions to the field of urology. I am elated that my work has been recognized as especially transformative and I hope to continue to play a role in advancing this profession.”

Launched this year, the Resident Clinical Innovation Award recognizes innovative clinical work of urology residents and fellows that promotes and has the potential to enhance quality clinical outcomes. The award acknowledges the value of clinical innovation to harness new technologies, access big data, develop systems of care to prevent, diagnose or treat urological disease and promote urological health.

Dr. Fakhoury’s winning project, “A Multi-Institutional Quality Assurance Patient Safety Project Across Urban Chicago; Changing County’s/Christ’s Catheter Culture,” implemented a difficult Foley catheter algorithm aimed at non-urologists in order to reduce Foley catheter associated trauma and catheter associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs). Educational sessions were also developed for and provided to high-volume, non-urologist utilizers of Foley catheters.

The project was a collaborative effort undertaken and envisioned by Dr. Fakhoury and his colleagues Ryan Power, DO, and Tony Ghorayeb, DO, a former chief resident and a junior resident at Cook County Urology respectively. The greater teams at both Cook County Urology and Advocate Christ Medical Center, comprised of Courtney M.P. Hollowell, MD, Patricia P. Vidal, MD, Mark A. Wille, MD, Traci P. Beck, MD, Aaron Berger, MD, Jae Kim, MD, Douglas Slakey, MD and Parisa Katoosian, RN, also played instrumental roles in supporting and actualizing the project.

“Dr. Fakhoury’s work is very important to advancing the quality and safety of patient care and he should be very proud of his achievements,” said Jason Hafron, MD, director of clinical research at Michigan Institute of Urology and chairman of LUGPA Forward, which oversees the award program. “Mathew’s work underscores the type of original and groundbreaking approaches to enhancing urologic care delivery and developing solutions that we look for when selecting a winner.”

Dr. Fakhoury and his work will be recognized at LUGPA’s 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting on Saturday, November 7, 2020.

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See Who is Hiring in LUGPA's Career Center

LUGPA's Career Center website is a place where urology residents can post their resumes, apply for jobs and get job alerts.

The site also features: 

Career Coaching - Coming from a variety of professional backgrounds, LUGPA's Career Center offers certified coaches that have the experience, training, and expertise needed to help you achieve your career goals.

Resume Writing - LUGPA's Career Center offers experts who are ready to critique your existing resume or help you craft a document that gets you noticed.

Reference Checking - Get your references checked, confidentially and professionally so you can be confident your past employers are helping, not hurting, your candidacy.


Visit the Career Center now: careers.lugpa.org.

LUGPA Media Monitor provides a curated view of relevant news from recent headlines. Our editors provide pithy comments to provide context, clarification or even points of contention to what is being popularly reported.

Court Victory for Independent Medicine in Fight for Site-Neutral Payments

On July 17, the D.C. Appeals Court overturned a district court's ruling that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services overstepped its legal authority finalizing site-neutral payments in the Outpatient Prospective Payment System final rule for 2019. In AHA v. Azar, the court ruled unanimously in favor of the Department of Health and Human Services, reversing a district court's ruling last September that CMS acted in a way that was "manifestly inconsistent with the statutory scheme" when it finalized the site-neutral payment as part of the OPPS final rule for 2019. Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, an appointee of President Barack Obama, wrote that the district court decision would be reversed since "we conclude that the regulation rests on a reasonable interpretation of HHS's statutory authority to adopt volume-control methods."

Editorial notes from LUGPA leaders: A big victory for independent practices, this decision may have been positively influenced by the amicus curiae brief filed by LUGPA and two other stakeholders earlier this year.  

Appeals Court Upholds Nearly 30% Payment Cut to 340B Hospitals 

A federal appeals court has ruled the Trump administration can install nearly 30% cuts to the 340B drug discount program. The July 31 ruling is the latest legal setback for hospitals that have been vociferously fighting cuts the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced back in 2017. 340B requires pharmaceutical manufacturers to deliver discounts to safety net hospitals in exchange for participation in Medicaid. A hospital will pay typically between 20% and 50% below the average sales price for the covered drugs.

Editorial notes from LUGPA leaders: 

As one of these Trump administration victories (above) a 30% cut in the 340B drug discount program can be instituted.  This is a big cash generator for hospitals. - David J. Ellis, MD 

It’s about time that the regulatory landscape becomes a level playing field and real reform takes place to help lower healthcare costs as seen within the 340B drug discount program. For too long, physicians have been demonized for the rising GDP of healthcare and that concept needs to change, especially while many practices are barely able to keep their practices up and running given the current pandemic. - Alan Krieger, MD  

Now Is Price Transparency’s Moment

In an op-ed, Richard G. Harris, MD, president of LUGPA, writes: “In recent years Americans have become familiar with the quote, “Never let a good crisis go to waste” — and for the nation’s largest hospital systems, many of which are sitting on billions of dollars of financial reserves, the challenges brought on by the coronavirus are no different. Through active lobbying of Congress and the administration, hospitals have received more than $175 billion in bailouts to date with more requested. But, in an effort to flip the script as hospitals lobby for additional funds, Congress should not let this crisis go to waste: now is the time for the federal government to push its price transparency agenda.”

Editorial notes from LUGPA leaders:  LUGPA’s President….  Well said Richard! - David J. Ellis, MD