March 19, 2013 Joe Bormel
There’s been a lot of progress at many levels in the last year on the usability front. At HIMSS earlier this month, there were 26 highly instructive presentations on the topic of usability. In this post, I’m going to introduce you the concept of making an explicit distinction between the end user’s mindset, and one being more characterized by sincerity or cleverness. We have a ways to go before usability in health information technology is where we want to be, but I think you’ll agree that clever trumps sincere every time as we move forward.
February 11, 2013 Joe Bormel
Recently, I participated in medical grand rounds at several hospitals. The primary topics of all these grand rounds were focused on delivering better care. One of these sessions was presented on the topic of coaching, something I have blogged about in the past to help advance the acceptance and use of HIT. Case in point, a physician I spoke with contended that the net of HIT applications was negative for both patient and provider satisfaction. I contend this is why some non-IT related behaviors, like coaching, are now receiving new and overdue attention. But are we doing enough?
January 18, 2013
It's 2013. Healthcare information technology is far more prevalent and standardized then it has ever been in the past. Some concepts that have been evolving from other industries, as well as in healthcare IT, have important applications and implications. From cloud computing to active collaboration and mobile computing this post analyzes what we should consider and provides simple suggestions to get started.
November 26, 2012 Joe Bormel
Self-service technology is readily available to healthcare providers of all sizes. Much of it is modular so you can implement it incrementally. You can build patient loyalty through reducing wait times by using the convenience of self-service registration, check in, and empowering patients to schedule their own appointments. There are many other benefits, too. For instance, you can significantly reduce denials, automate co-payments, lower your administrative costs, with more to come. Are you ready?
November 7, 2012 Joe Bormel
Should physicians stay in clinical practice full-time, part-time, or not at all? The non-clinical hassles around caring for patients—administrative, technological and workload combined with compensation issues—are causing many physicians to re-examine their career paths.
October 16, 2012 Joe Bormel
More than 214 people have been diagnosed with meningitis after receiving a tainted injection. The drug was contaminated with a fungus. Meanwhile, there's been another contamination event going on in the media related to healthcare IT. The writers of two articles conclude the benefits of HCIT are wildly overblown and represent a fanciful initiative that should be shut down. We look into this meningitis outbreak and its HCIT implications to help disprove their conclusions.
September 28, 2012 Joe Bormel
In Part 1 of this blog, we discussed the fact that the approaches we used to achieve Stage 1 of Meaningful Use may not be sufficient to move forward to achieve Stage 2. Here in the final installment, I’ll provide some detailed examples of why scalability will be a key to success in Stage 2. And in the end, the most important factors will be understanding and communicating your own local practice experience.
September 18, 2012 Joe Bormel
Achieving MU Stage 2 is a complex undertaking that requires, among other things, the proper and efficient application of scalability. We need the ability to scale up what we did to achieve MU Stage 1. However, not all methods are scalable. So as we move forward to MU Stage 2, I’d like to make some recommendations for those of you who are resilient, but who really don’t like surprises.
August 9, 2012 Joe Bormel
The HCIT challenges elaborated in the context of AF447 remain challenges for us all. They underscore the necessity to move forward: off of paper, off of systems relying on individual human brain power, off of unreliable communications of semantically inoperable health stories, and off of systems without clear databases, shared and common measurement frameworks, and disciplined processes based on solid problem lists.
August 1, 2012 Joe Bormel
In Part 1 of this series, we reviewed the crash of Air France Flight 447. I noted that from the final report of the tragedy, I developed eight factors that contributed to the loss of everyone aboard that I believe can be directly related to Clinical Decision Support in healthcare IT. Now, let's explore the first four points in-depth to learn how they really do apply to HCIT CDS.
