Summer vacations via car.  Makes me wonder what ever happened to station wagons—anyone who does not remember Richard Nixon may want to use Google to the term ‘station wagon’.  We had a sky blue Ford; others had the one with the faux wood-grain side panels like the one Chevy Chase drove in the movie Vacation.

I noticed last week as we drove from Pennsylvania and crossed into Maryland how the blacktop improved and that the shoulder plantings were more numerous and spiffier as though Maryland was showing off, to make you feel you are entering a better place and leaving a worse one. On the return trip the same scenario was reversed as the road for the first mile back into Pennsylvania was much nicer than was the last mile of road in Maryland.

It makes me wonder why states do not put the same level of effort into the last mile instead to make you miss the place you were leaving.

Now let us think about your healthcare IT vendors.  Remember those guys?  The ones who when they courted you took you to dinners and baseball games and golfing.  You probably have one of their coffee mugs on your desk and a few dozen of their Rollerball pens and a commemorative golf towel clipped to you golf bag.  At the get-go everything was first class.  The vendor hoard was attentive and still picking up the lunch tab.

Then they left; all of them.  You surmised the project must be over.  The vendor’s project manager no longer had you on his speed-dial—your number had been replaced with the number of his new golfing buddy, the CIO at Our Lady of Perpetual Implementations.

It makes me wonder why vendors do not put the same level of effort into the last mile of their implementation as they did the first mile.  If they did maybe your perception of them would be better.  Maybe the implementation would have gone better.