MIAMI, FL – Staff at University of Miami Hospital are grieving today after the tragic death of 32-year-old well-respected and well-loved hospitalist Dr. Aaron Epic-Metrics. He died suddenly after being drowned in what can only be described as a tsunami of administrative kudos.
According to several co-hospitalists, performance measures had recently revealed that Epic-Metrics was leading every category when it came to RVU productivity, length of stay (LOS), readmission rates, and patient satisfaction. Dubbed in the C-suite as the “Quadruple Crown,” University of Miami Hospital administrators couldn’t contain their excitement.
“Before he knew it, Aaron was surrounded by no fewer than 30 black suits, gushing with praise, bombarding him with kudos from every angle,” said friend and colleague Dr. Miriam Status-Quo. “Aaron was never a strong swimmer. In thirty seconds he was neck deep in kudos, by the one-minute mark his lungs were filled with water and shortly after that he drowned.”
It is unclear yet to police investigators if this was a homicide, but at the very minimum should be considered incredibly reckless. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently passed a mandate stating clinicians should wear life jackets to prevent drowning in paperwork. With Epic-Metrics death, expect the CDC to expand the mandate.
“The CDC is all about prevention, so you can anticipate a new mandate for life jackets and life preservers when clinicians are in the immediate vicinity of administrators,” explained Director of the CDC Brenda Fitzgerald. “Death by kudos is the second leading cause of drowning among health care professionals, second only to paperwork.”
Epic-Metrics is the fifteenth health care professional to have been killed by a kudos tsunami in 2018 already. Meteorologists have not ruled out climate change as a root cause of the increased activity of administrative kudos.
The hospital administrators really wanted to commend and applaud the Code Team who tried to revive Epic-Metrics, but thankfully managed to restrain themselves.
