Insights
Square Peg – Round Hole Problem
Rapid adoption of EHRs has been hindered by a variety of factors, including a fragmented marketplace, changing federal incentives, provider uncertainty about the regulatory landscape, and the striking lack of interoperability between systems.
Strategic Operational Plans
Standing up in a canoe is hard enough. Standing up in two canoes with one foot in each while traveling through Class 4 rapids is mind-boggling. Class 4 rapids are defined as “intense, powerful but predictable rapids requiring precise boat handling in turbulent water....
Getting Ahead
Cloud-based applications maintained by vendors offer significant advantages in cost of ownership by eliminating the cost of upgrades, providing immediate access to the latest versions of applications, and reducing the costs associated with maintaining hardware.
Relationships Matter
Patients with sub-par experiences often post negative comments on one or more social media platforms to express their dissatisfaction. These posts then form the building blocks for a provider’s online reputation.
Still Babbling
The problem of poor interoperability did not suddenly appear in the hot Washington summer of 2014. It has existed for several years; I called it out in an article published in this journal at the end of 2013.
Think Like a Retailer
The sophistication of data collection and analytics tools for tracking consumer behavior expanded with technological advancement and broader distribution of consumer technology.
How to Effectively Choose and Assign Clinical Staff
Although information technology cannot replace the staff delivering care to patients, it can assist organizations in choosing the best talent available, help develop that talent, and determine the best way to utilize the skills of these professionals.
A Symphony of Evidence-based Staffing
In many ways healthcare is like a symphony orchestra. Although information technology can enhance care planning, assist in medication administration, and reduce duplicative testing, it cannot replace the people required to deliver care services to patients.
Railroads, Weed and EMRs
In the early 1970s, Larry Weed, MD further developed his structured documentation approach and described the problem-oriented medical record (POMR).
Properly Staffing Our Organizations With Nurses?
Fortunately, the expansion in the use of electronic medical records provides the clinical content data that can help accurately drive patient acuity scoring.
Bacchus and Healthcare
In the absence of understandable, easily accessible quality metrics, we utilize price as a surrogate for quality.
WhatsApp Lessons to Engage Patients
Rather than think this consumer engagement only benefits the companies deploying the technology, consumers embrace these new processes because they also obtain benefits from doing so.
At All Cost?
How does an industry survive—and how can our society expect healthcare costs to be reasonable—when hospitals do not know their costs of production or reasonableness of the bills they send to patients and insurance companies?
Our Tower of Babel
Although this explains well why communication is so difficult among people from different countries, it fails to address the inability of our various healthcare information technology (HIT) systems to exchange patient data seamlessly.
Evolving to Health 3.0
Organizations that will survive under the new realities of ACA recognize the power of healthcare information technology (HIT) to assist them in reworking their business processes and clinical workflows to achieve the goal of high quality, affordable care.
Care Collaboration in a Value-Based World
Organizations that will survive under the new realities of ACA recognize the power of healthcare information technology (HIT) to assist them in reworking their business processes and clinical workflows to achieve the goal of high quality, affordable care.
The Health Supply Chain
The Health Supply Chain model provides a broad, all-encompassing view of care delivery that links both administrative and clinical processes and workflows in the “manufacture” of patient care.
American Autos Circa 1970 and Healthcare
With the rapid shift from volume-based reimbursement to value-based reimbursement, organizations must change the way they deliver healthcare, with Deming’s quality rules offering clues as to what needs to be done.