“Your Doctors are Human Beings, Too!”

Sunday, November 17, 2024, 4 p.m. Eastern Time

Ruth H. Axelrod, MHSA, PhD

You may find it easy or challenging to relate to each of your doctors and other providers in ways that help you get what you need from them. Both doctor and patient contribute to that relationship, usually in different ways, based on our personalities, roles and expectations. This presentation and discussion aimed to offer you some tools that can help make that relationship both effective and fulfilling. The discussion was led by Ruth Axelrod, who drew on her career in healthcare and academia, as well as her personal health journey, to facilitate conversation.

Bio: Ruth Axelrod is a retired university professor who lives in Concord, NH, with her husband and black cat; she currently gardens, pursues various hobbies, travels, and researches whatever strikes her fancy.

Ruth was born and raised overseas, a child of American expatriates who helped develop institutions and programs in India’s higher education system. She attended a US-accredited international school in the Himalayan Mountains before moving to the U.S. for college.

During Ruth’s first career in health services administration, she served as Operations Manager, where she worked closely with doctors, a wide variety of other clinical care professionals and individual patients, for an NIH-funded General Clinical Research Center at Methodist Hospital in Houston, TX. She also served as a senior manager and internal consultant for the Medical Faculty Associates, a 365-physician multispecialty group practice at The George Washington University, in Washington, DC.

This managerial work fostered Ruth’s fascination with human behavior, leading to a career transition to become an academic professor and consultant in Individual and Group Behavior in Organizations—specializing in leadership, team building and the psychology of decision-making. Ruth earned a Master of Health Services Administration and a PhD in Management from The George Washington University. On into retirement, she also served as a management consultant for various non-profit organizations.

Materials from the presentation:

• Slides from the presentation
• Full recording (This version contains chapter headings for easier viewing)