Right now, things are a bit busy around here.
Lots of swine flu prep happening for the office and the group, including an upcoming talk at a local college campus. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to get ahead of this thing using education. You can argue with irate patients demanding Tamiflu when it’s not indicated, or you can educate them before they get sick, arming them with solid info.
I’ve bookmarked several über useful CDC sites for exactly this reason, like this one for antivirals, this for vaccines, and this for general patient info.
If you can fire these up from within your EHR, they’re mighty helpful as reminders of when to treat, when to not, who’s a vaccine candidate, etc. And you can print handouts directly from them, email the links, and post them to Facebook — superb examples of high utility websites. You can even sign up for email notifications, whenever the CDC updates the site.
My medical IT work proceeds apace, too — ever polishing EHRs at the local level. The tweaking process never stops, regardless of the size of the fix. Small, medium, and large scale tweaks mirror legacy (old stuff), immediate (now stuff), and future (going to become stuff) issues.
Which leads nicely to a talk that I’m working on.
You’re Gonna Talk About What?
More on this after it’s been given, at the upcoming annual NextGen Users Group Meeting. But the topic will be vendor-neutral and customer service centric: how to turn your doctors into raving EHR fans. Tall order, no?
Here’s the one line, elevator pitch preview: it all boils down to doctor satisfaction, melded with organizational and human nature savvy. Juggle those 3 balls well, and your darling multi-headed monster (providers + EHR vendor + IT support + patients, et al) will live and thrive, bwa-ha-ha!
And if you don’t juggle well? Do you get points for juggling at all?
You better believe it — it still represents your commitment to reducing entropy in your corner of the universe.
Call it what you will: EHR polishing, customer service, improving your documenting workflow. Getting to the next level with better P4P, lower costs, shorter wait times, and improved patient satisfaction scores. Whatever the name you give it, you juggle and polish to make things better.
Carrying on “as you were” is not an option.
Settling: The New “S” Word
We’re all working hard, involved in patient care in one way or another. And every single one of us in this electronic record carnival is juggling our main mission, along with our families, networking, and finances, while wondering “Where is this whole movable feast heading?”
As such, we drop a lot of balls. We chase them into the corners of the room, and restart the cascade. It’s not pretty.
And it’s going to stay not-pretty, because if there’s one thing that complex systems with lots of moving parts tend to do, it’s to be inelegant and ugly. Unless we put in the time and energy to make things better.
You want raving fans, screaming like little girls? Seamless documenting sessions? Performance numbers that would make Donald Trump smile?
All that will come, when we get to a higher state of affairs. And things will get there, as surely as the Department of Defense ARPANET evolved into the Internet and the myriad incarnations of truly awesome information use. Amazon.com. WebMD. Medscape. Epocrates. Evernote. Google. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the various flavors of social networking. The CDC website.
But as participants and shapers, it’s time for us to lead, not settle for the status quo. Those balls aren’t going to juggle themselves.
