STORIES & SOLUTIONS FOR THE MODERN BUSINESS USER

I recently read an article in the New York Times titled “The Joy of Standards: Life is a lot easier when you can plug in to any socket.” The authors begin by diving deep into the topic, discussing standards around the size, consistency, and design of the 8-by-16-inch concrete block. From there, we learn about standards-producing organizations and how they interact with governmental agencies. The article ends with a reminder that society needs a strong base upon which to build: “In an age of breathless enthusiasm for the new and “disruptive,” it’s worth remembering the mundane agreements embodied in the things around us. It’s [the] very ordinariness and settledness of standards that enable us to survive, and to move ahead.”

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the day-long CHIME CIO Forum that precedes the HIMSS conference in Orlando. It’s a great get-together; there is much hobnobbing and networking with smart CIOs and vendor executives, as well as a slate of speakers that challenge the audience to think beyond our typical world of healthcare information technology. One of the lectures was given by Kate Sheridan, and she stopped me in my tracks with her wisdom and insights.

You’re likely reading this on one of the last days of the HIMSS annual conference, or maybe just as it’s ended. If you attended HIMSS this year, you might be suffering from PHES (Post-HIMSS Exhaustion Syndrome). And before you go where I know you’re going, let me cut you off and tell you that I do not know the proper ICD-10-CM code for PHES.

I was recently at a presentation with the entire C-suite of the hospital in attendance. We were talking about technology and listening to a few vendors predict their future as well as ours. A slide was projected showing data interfaces coming from multiple sources (patient, health system, payer, etc.) coming together with an algorithm at the center. And voila, from The Algorithm (my snarky capitalization added) came forth healthcare recommendations for the patient’s care. It was a moment I’d dreamed about, but never before witnessed.

The distribution industry is in transition. Companies working on older technologies are realizing limitations with their current systems while other organizations have already begun their digital transformation journey. One of the biggest roadblocks for organizations to becoming digital pioneers is not having a clear overall digital roadmap.

EHR Implementation projects from the last decade have been costly and time-consuming projects for most healthcare systems in the country. Making an implementation successful often requires a ‘get live, then optimize’ mentality. When the organization is ready to optimize, discussions about data management are typically top of the priority list.

I recently wrote about how I always try to follow the vendors’ recommendations when implementing healthcare information technology (HIT). I’ll summarize my thoughts in case you missed them: I want to work with vendors who know what they’re doing and have done similar work before. I expect those vendors to understand my business needs and wants, and have solid best practices about how best to achieve those needs and wants with their technology. I try to follow those recommendations unless I or my team can articulate operational or clinical reasons negating the vendor’s directions.

With New Year’s Day in our very recent past, I thought it appropriate to propose some resolutions for those of us in the healthcare IT trenches. These are in no particular order, and like all resolutions, I make no commitment to following any of them myself.

Medicine has been plagued by a culture of paternalism since . . . while, since forever. It’s still around, of course, but we’ve come a long way in the last few decades. I cringe when I watch movies from the 1940s and 1950s portraying a physician sharing private medical information with a woman’s husband because she couldn’t be trusted to understand complicated health information. Or maybe because she would react “hysterically” to a poor prognosis. While those sexist stereotypes are hopefully on their way out, I still see some physicians continue in less obvious, but still paternalistic, ways.

Installing software at a hospital can be like taking a road trip across the country with a caravan of cars. In one car, you have the IT department. In the other cars, you have the end users. The goal of the trip is the same for everyone - to arrive safely at the destination as quickly as possible.