EMRs and Meaningful Use

He's a horror story that is clearly not meaningful use.

Doctors and other clinicians are busy. EMRs have to have an obvious benefit to attract use. Complaints that providers would rather go back to paper just says we aren't paying enough attention to good design in the data flow of the EMR.

Social Media

It's all the rage to talk about using new forms of media for selling your goods and services. To be seen as a cool company by many, you need a facebook and Twitter presence. Despite the countless Tweets about how to make social media pay, the people I have talked to are having a hard time quantifying the payback.

Personally, I have found facebook to be a great way to reconnect with old friends, as well as keep in better touch with local friends I only see every month or so. As the piece of flair that one of my cousins sent to my 72 year old father said, "facebook - now with old people".


My personal experience with Twitter has been much less satisfying. Perhaps I'm not following the right people, but it doesn't seem to be adding much. Although the NYT says that Twitter is not for teenagers, I haven't found it to be for many of my contemporaries yet either.

Dave Winer suggests that Twitter and facebook are too ephemeral, and is especially upset about the possibility that all the shortened URLs in Twitter will disappear someday. He wants us all to blog, and to store the content is a simple text file.

My 20 year old daughter, on the other hand, thinks no one is interested in blogs. But she does read my family blog, which has been the greatest pleasure I get from social media.

So, where is all this going? For my post, I'm not so sure. For social media itself, no one is sure. There are a lot of different ways to communicate today, both personally and professionally. In both contexts, we need to choose the media that's right for the message and use it.

Leaders

Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead.

Seth mostly talks about marketing, but after reading this excerpt from his book Tribes, I'll be buying that (on the Kindle for iPhone)

Home Care's place in the Health Care debate

Despite my obvious bias after 18 years serving the home care industry, it is simply unavoidable that care in a patient's home is cheaper AND better than forcing people into other places to live when they need care.

Please read the information on this site:
Help Us Choose Home

Health data entry

In an earlier post, I talked about how much work it takes to enter your own data directly into Google Health. Wired magazine had an article recently about how Nike has changed that for thousands of runners. Chris Anderson, author of Free, would like the way they used free software to sell shoes.

The trade off that people make by giving away their data and by sticking with a certain brand seems to be worth it to them to have their running history easily accessible. We need our health records to be as easy...

Enjoying the job

As a leader, a big part of what you need to do is recognize what people are good at, even if they don't recognize it themselves. Putting people in a position to utilize their strengths will enable them to do good work, and they will enjoy that work. Which will, in turn, inspire them to do even more of it. Aside from watching your boss put in a good day's work, there is nothing more inspiring than getting up in the morning knowing you will able to contribute to your organization's success on that very day.

Health insurance reform instead of Health Care reform

Toby Cosgrove, CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, has a great perspective on the debate going on (from Newsweek).

The local paper has an interview with him as well.