About Dr. Khashy
Why radiology? For Harvard-trained physician and healthcare management expert Dr. Khashayar Rafat Zand (Dr. Khahsy), it was the transparency of medical imaging.
He is a physician who believes the patient experience is key to healing. Creating empathetic medical systems is an obsession for Dr. Khashy as evidence mounts that patient comfort improves outcomes.
The Mission
Uniting Inquiry offers a structured approach to healthcare innovation through the mutual exploration of shared human experiences and informed discussion.
Trained in radiology and conflict management, Dr. Khashy’s framework for medical conversations aims to bring experts and patients together to solve complex problems.
Change Requires Collaboration
The Uniting Inquiry principle is a combination of three methods: Socratic Inquiry, Humble Inquiry and Appreciative Inquiry.
The first emphasizing science and best practices; the second, questioning over confrontation; and the third, the engagement of all possible stakeholders.
“Socratic Inquiry requires a collaborative conversation,” Dr. Khashy explains. “If there’s conflict, that’s not a good place to start. The goal is asking questions until you reach the truth — a truth that can be agreed upon by all stakeholders involved. And in doing so, you expose contradictions. That leads to a constant search for the truth in a very systematic way.”
Collaboration
Community
Collaboration Requires Community
This media project challenges healthcare practitioners to accept a fundamental truth: Doctors don’t know everything.
Having the confidence to say “I don’t know” opens up the possibility of community and shared learning in healthcare management. Especially in times of crisis, multi-institution healthcare communities can come together to reveal powerful new insights and balance increasingly thin resources.
The method of Humble Inquiry, so important to building medical communities, gets its name from the book by author Edgar Schein, Dr. Khashy noted. Schein defines Humble Inquiry as, “the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.”
Community Requires Unity
To achieve unity in a network of Canadian healthcare institutions, we look to Appreciative Inquiry. Managers would be wise to adopt this inquiry-based strategy for identifying strengths.
“It’s not deficit-based, e.g. we don’t have this so we don’t do that,” Dr. Khashy explains. “In fact, it’s completely the opposite.”
Uniting Inquiry suggests a positive approach called Appreciative Inquiry to bring healthcare institutions together. It focuses more on institutional competence and how it can be shared, and less on weaknesses.
Unity