EHR: the uncertainty of certitude

Posted by Paul Roemer on February 3, 2010

When I was living in Colorado and much younger my friend and I decided that instead of running during our lunch break we would sit in on an aerobics class. Our plan was to hide away in the back of the class, watch the ladies, and then head back to the office. No sweat—literally, that was also part of the plan. Our thought process was that if women and other lower life forms could do it, how difficult could it be? We were mainly manly men; excuse the use of alliteration.

Within ten minutes we were peeling ourselves from the floor, barely able to lift our arms and legs. What we’d viewed as an hour of simple stretching coupled with an hour of looking like mainly manly men had reduced us to a pair of whimpering sissy boys. We also learned that if you sit in the back of the class that in order to exit you had to make it past all of the ladies as you dragged your carcass from the room.

Fast forward a few decades. I went to an exercise class called spinning. Sounds a little like ballet. It’s a stationary bike. A large TV hangs on a wall. Once again the room is packed with non-males, including my wife. My take on it is that it’s a bike class for women who’d rather watch Regis and pretend to exercise instead of actually breaking a sweat. What the heck; I was already there, why not humor her. The instructor smirked at me when I asked her to tune the TV to ESPN. She inserted a CD of The Killers, cranked it all the way up, and we started pedaling. Pyramids, intervals, uphill, more uphills. Twenty minutes into it my water bottle was empty, my towel soaked. The ladies, including my wife, were chatting away as though they were walking the dog.

Not everything changes with time. Sometimes it better to participate than to watch. Sometimes it’s better to watch. Sometimes, no matter how certain one is, sometimes certainty is meant to be changed. Sometimes certainty is based on bad data. Like the certainty that comes from knowing, “We’re doing just fine, thank you very much.” What is it that everyone holds with such certitude in your firm?

The certitude of certainty.  Ain’t it grand being right?  Hear the story of the CIO, the vendor and the consultant driving through Iowa—please don’t ask what they were doing in Iowa, perhaps Nebraska was closed.  They see a black cow and the vendor says, “I never knew that the cows in Iowa were brown.”  The CIO says, “You are over-generalizing from the evidence.  All we can say is that some cows in Iowa are brown.”  The consultant shakes his head and quips, “You’re both certain and both wrong.  All we can infer logically is that there is at least one cow in Iowa, at least one side of which is brown.”

I return to the prior question.  What is it that everyone holds with such certitude in your firm?  The efficacy of throwing IT at a business problem?  That through rigorous investigation you selected an outstanding EHR?  That through minor due diligence you selected an EHR that may work okay if nobody looks too hard?  Or did you select a bunch of cows?

A herd of cows?  Of course I’ve heard of cows, there’s a bunch in Iowa.

This entry was posted on February 3, 2010 at 3:45 pm and is filed under EHR, Strategy, Vendors-What’s not to like?. Tagged: EHR, EHR vendors, electronic health record, Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry.