Electronic Health Records: First Do No Harm

In medicine, we have all heard the creed “first, do no harm”, from the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. This is an excellent principle for physicians to guide them in their practice of medicine. It is also, however, an excellent creed to guide physicians in their quest for the right electronic health record (EHR) system.

Most of the practices that we advise and that are using some form of EHR are struggling to make their adoption successful. The struggles range from the minor troubles such as workflow disruptions and input irritations that drive staff nuts, to the “what have we done to ourselves” sentiment. There is a common theme among these practices, and that is that every one of them made major missteps key areas of the project before the first piece of software was ever installed. They were not adequately prepared, and as one physician recently shared with me, his practice has been “harmed” by their EHR efforts. Read more

Your Practice Won’t Be Your Father’s Private Practice

The medical practice of tomorrow will look much different than it does today. I recognize that statement to be fairly obvious, but my sense is that the transition is happening much faster than most doctors recognize right now. Only about 10% of current medical practices use an electronic medical record but the push is on for doctors to start using one. First will be the carrot approach; each doctor may supposedly receive up to $44,000 to help defray the cost of converting to a digital office. Later will come the stick: Read more

Using Twitter in Healthcare Practice

I came across a motivating blog posting while researching the use of new technologies in medical practice recently. Phil Baumann wrote an article titled 140 Health Care Uses for Twitter on his blog way back in January 2009 (I already feel like I’m late to this innovation!). The list is also available as an ebook. Before seeing his list I was attempting to write one of my own but quit after seeing his extensive ideas. I’m sure there are even more useful ways to harness Twitter’s technology. Let us know here if you think of other good uses for Twitter in your practice.

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P.S. In case you need some more information about Twitter, here’s a recent Twitter how-to article published on the MSN website on February 9, 2009: Getting Started with Twitter.