STORIES & SOLUTIONS FOR THE MODERN BUSINESS USER

I was recently reading an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Everyone hates customer service; this Is why.” It’s an amazing piece detailing how customer service is getting worse while businesses leverage technology to understand how poorly they can treat their customers before they lose sales. Yeah, I just wrote that. Some businesses have learned that they can mistreat their paying customers without deleterious effect, and have taken advantage of these findings to do just that (hello cable and phone companies.) Other more “respectable” groups are using technology to do more with less, and I want to focus on them.

I recently read an article in the New York Times titled “Undercover in a Hospital Bed.” It describes how hospitals and medical centers are contracting with “secret shopper” consultants. Being a secret shopper at a fast-food restaurant or a retail clothing store is fairly straightforward: walk in, pretend you’re a customer, observe how you’re treated and if employees are complying with company standards, make a purchase, and walk out. When it comes to being a secret shopper in a hospital or emergency department (ED), the stakes are a bit higher.

There is a well-known concept in computer science called Garbage In, Garbage Out (or GIGO for short). You need not be a brain surgeon to figure out what it means. If you enter bad data into a program or an algorithm, you’ll get bad data as output. No duh. Seems self-evident to me. That said, I’m not sure everyone has adopted the GIGO way of life, and it’s making me sad.

Healthcare IT is such a foreign language to people who don’t think about the intersection of health and technology every day. Before I entered the field, similar to other healthcare newcomers, I thought nothing of the nurses’ or doctors’ notes, aside from whether the blood pressure number they told me was normal. We are not too far removed from the days of paper everything, but I now find it interesting to see the magic behind the technology curtain.

As many of my readers know, I used to work for a software company which is based near Madison, WI that makes a popular electronic health record (EHR). I won’t name the company to help protect their privacy. I practiced primary care pediatrics for many years before moving over the vendor side, so the ways of a large corporation were foreign to me in many aspects. While this might sound odd, what follows is a true story.

Historically, community, critical access, and rural hospitals didn’t have many options when it came to their enterprise systems. Tight margins and limited technical support have held smaller hospitals back from being able to invest in enterprise-scale ERP systems. Often, disconnected systems and paper-based processes were often put in place for materials management, financials, human resources, etc.

I recently read an article in Wired magazine about what sound design is with respect to information technology (IT) and why sound design is so important. I admit that I’ve rarely thought about this field of software development, but it really is important. What exactly is sound design? The author introduces the concept this way: “How do you know whether Siri heard you? Just as in human interaction, good communication is about the flow of conversation, the ongoing exchange of information.” Sound designers try to ensure that the two-way communication between humans and technology works, intuitively and naturally.

The electronic health record (EHR) problem list is . . . well, it’s a problem. I’ve worked with many of the leading EHR vendors and their tools, and no one has solved this quandary. While I haven’t met a physician (or any clinician for that matter) who doesn’t want a well-maintained and curated longitudinal problem list for their patients, I have met many doctors who don’t want to take on the responsibility. “I’m just the specialist” or “I’m in the ED” are common statements, but one might argue (I might argue) that these are the very folks who benefit the most from an up-to-date list of patient issues and concerns.

Anyone who has been part of an ERP implementation knows the importance of having the right people on the project team. While emphasis is typically put on the technology itself, in the end, it is the people of the organization who are using the system. They are the ones who need to know the ins and outs of the software. Dedicating the right resources who know the business, the vision for the future and how the system will be used can drive a more seamless implementation.