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As I work with large, complicated, and sophisticated hospital groups around the country, I often see IT decisions that seem, well, that seem wrong. Maybe it’s not that they’re wrong so much as they are short-sighted. I can probably best explain with an example:
With 2017 closing out another typical, uneventful, kind of boring year, it’s incumbent upon us to predict what the next year holds. What’s that? It’s not incumbent upon us to predict the future, you say. We can simply go about our regular routine and deal with life as it comes at us? Well, sir or madam, you clearly don’t have to deal with my VP of Marketing. She says it’s incumbent, so it is, darn it. Resistance is futile.
Physicians are sometimes difficult people to deal with. Did you know that? No? If not, then you probably don’t work closely with physicians! I’ve heard lots of interesting explanations as to why docs can be demanding and picky and obstinate, but when I have the conversation about physicians and their peculiarities, I always go back to my medical school experience.
I write this as I hurtle through the air at 34,000 feet. OK, maybe hurtle isn’t the best word. I’m in a plane owned by Delta, and I’m thrilled to be here. A day ago, the busiest airport in the world stopped – just stopped! – due to a complete power failure in every terminal. The airport that I reference is of course Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International.
Last week, I was traveling from my hotel to my company’s main office when my colleagues and I decided a detour for coffee was absolutely necessary. We had a five-minute trip ahead of us, and one of us (not me!) had the brilliant idea to order the drinks and food on the Starbucks mobile app so that we could get in and out quickly. Naturally, we all started shouting our orders.
Someone much more intelligent than me once said that too much of a good thing may be a bad thing. Or could be a bad thing. Or something like that. You get the idea.
National Health IT Week (October 2-6, 2017) is designed to bring the health IT community together to raise awareness of the benefits of information technology. From the billing office to the doctor’s office, we’ve seen some amazing advancements over the last decade, ranging from the rise of the electronic health record (EHR) to portal technology, big data, and cloud ERP. We join healthcare professionals in celebrating the value of health IT with a few innovative trends worthy of recognition:
What I hear often when visiting physicians who are using the problem list in an electronic health record (EHR) is “it doesn’t give me any information.” When I ask why, is it empty? They say, “No, there are a hundred things on it. It’s filled with lots of stuff.” The problem is that you really don’t have an accurate snapshot of a patient when people are just throwing problems on the problem list.
Physicians have to start de-duplicating and doing work on the problem list because it’s not accurate, tight, up-to-date and reflective of the patient’s acuity and status today. And so, they get uninvolved with the problem list and the issues get increasingly worse.
I was recently sitting in a business meeting with some of my company’s leadership, discussing our financial performance and our future. I heard things like:
From the perspective of physician leaders, the HIMSS 2017 meeting was overwhelming (as always!) There are always more sessions to attend and more vendors with whom to visit than is humanly possible, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have fun trying.