EHR

How the Grinch stole healthcare

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Not much has changed since I wrote this two years ago…or has it?

Every Congressman Down in Congress-ville
Liked Health reform a lot…But the Payors,
Who lived just North of Congress-ville,
Did NOT!

The Payors hated Health Reform! The Congressional reform season!
And as everyone’s heard there is more than one reason.
Was it the fear of losing their monopoly right?
Worried, perhaps, that Congress might indict.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that the uninsured took them all to the wall.

Staring down from their man-caves with indemnifying frowns
At the warm lighted windows below in the town.
For they knew every Congressman down in Congress-ville beneath,
Canted an ear to hear Congress gnashing their teeth.

“If this reform passes, they’ll kill our careers!”
“Healthcare reform! It’s practically here!”
Then they growled, the ideologues’ fingers nervously drumming,
“We MUST find a way to keep Reform from coming!”

For, tomorrow, they knew…

…Stumbling home from the tavern at a quarter past two What each Congressman, intern, and page just might just do And then all the milieu. Oh the milieu, the milieu
Which the Payors hated more than their mom’s Mulligan stew.

Then all the Congressmen, the left and the right, would sit down and meet.
And they’d meet! And they’d meet!
And they’d MEET! MEET! MEET! MEET!
Implement full provision; cover pre-existing…how sweet
That was something the Payors couldn’t stand in the least!

And THEN they’d do something Payors liked least of all!
Every Congressman down in Congress-ville, the tall and the small,
Would stand close together, their Healthcare bells ringing.
With Blackberrys-in-hand, the Congress would start pinging!

They’d ping! And they’d ping!
AND they’d PING! PING! PING! PING!
And the more the Obligators thought of the Congressman-Health-Ping
The more they each thought, “I must stop reform-ing!
“Why for all of these years we’ve put up with it now!
We MUST stop health Reform from coming!
…But HOW?”

Then they got an idea!
An awful idea!
THE Indemnifiers
GOT A WONDERFULLY, AWFUL IDEA!

“I know what to do!” The CEO Payor laughed in his throat.
And he made a quick Congressional hat and a coat.
And he chuckled, and clucked, “What a great Payor raucous!
“With this coat and this hat, I’ll look just like Saint Bacchus!”

“All I need is a pass…”
The Payor looked around.
Since Congressional passes are scarce, there was none to be found.
Did that stop the old Payor…?
No! The Payor simply said,
“If I can’t find a pass, I’ll make one instead!”
So he called his aide Max. Then he took some red paper
And he dummied up the pass and he started this caper.

THEN
He loaded some bags
And some old empty sacks
On a Benz 550
And he rode with old Max.

Then the Payor called, “Dude!”
And the Benz started down
To the offices where the Congressmen
Lay a-snooze in their town.

All their windows were dark. Quiet snow filled the air.
All the Congressmen were dreaming sweet dreams of healthcare
When the Payor came to the first office in the square.
“This is stop number one,” The old Warrantist – a winner
And he slipped passed the guard, like sneaking to a State Dinner.

Then he slid down the hallway, Harry Reid was in sight.
Reid was chumming Pelosi, he planned quite a night.
He got nervous only once, for a moment or two.
Then he realized that the leadership hadn’t a clue
Then he found the Congressional stimuli all hung in a row.
“These Stimuli,” he grinned, “are the first things to go!”

The Payor slithered and slunk, with a smile somewhat mordant,
Around the old Cloakroom, looking quite discordant!
There were copies of the bill stuffed in jackets and on chairs, Why, he even found a copy tucked under the stairs
And he stuffed them in bags. Then the Payor, very neatly,
Started humming the jingle from Blue Cross; rather Cheeky!

Then he slunk to the Senate Chamber, the one facing East
He took the Senators’-copies!—didn’t mind in the least!
He cleaned out that Chamber and almost slipped on the floor.
Saw an Internet router, and thought of Al Gore

Then he stuffed all the copies in the trunk of his Benz.
And he thought to himself, “Why don’t I have friends?” “There’s always Tiger,” he said with no jest But TW’s being chased by reporters, those pests.

The Payor spotted the Grinch having trouble with his sacks
And he lent him a hand—he offered him Max Max was quite pleased, for he knew this December,
That the Grinch would become the Payor’s newest board member.

The Grinch was all smiles–he’d made quite a killing
Offering to help pillage if the Payor was willing.
He stared at the Payor and asked, “New glasses?”
The Payor simply smiled, saying “These people are such (You did that to yourself, not me.)

And, you know, that old Payor was so smart and conniving
When he next saw Pelosi he found himself smiling!
“Why, my dear little Nanc’,” the Bacchus look-alike stiffened,
“Botox in this light makes you look like a Griffin.”
“I’m taking these bills home,” he said pointing to the copy.
“There’s a comma on one page that looks way too sloppy.”

And his fib fooled the Griffin. Then he patted her head
And he gave her a wink, and he sent her to bed
And as Speaker Pelosi shuffled off to her army,
The Payor said to himself, “What a waste of Armani!”

The last thing the Payor needed to do,
Was to mess with these records systems, all four thousand and two.
So he drove to HHS, the DOD and the VA,
And stuffed mint jelly in their servers so their networks would not play

And the one EHR, that still worked in the DC
Was the one bought from CostCo and tucked under the tree.

Then he did some more damage
To HIEs, and the N-HIN,
Making the idea of a healthcare network
Just a has-been!

It was quarter past dawn…
None in Congress were his friends
All the Congressmen, still a-snooze
When he packed up his Benz,
Packed it up with their copies of reform in those bags! Stacked to the leather ceiling,
Manila envelopes with name tags!

Three miles away were the banks of the river,
He was poised with the bags all set to deliver!
“Pooh-pooh to the Congressmen!” he was Payor-ish-ly humming.
“They’re finding out now that no Reform is coming!
“They’re just waking up! I know just what they’ll do!
“Their mouths will hang open a minute or two
“The all the Congressman down in Congress-ville will all cry BOO-HOO!”

“That’s a noise,” grinned the Payor,
“That I simply must hear!”
So he paused and the Payor put a hand to his ear.
And he did hear a sound rising over the snow.
It started in low. Then it started to grow…

But the sound wasn’t sad!
Why, this sound sounded merry!
It couldn’t be so!
But it WAS merry! VERY!

He stared down at Congress-ville!
The Payor popped his eyes!
Then he shook!
What he saw was a shocking surprise!

Every Congressman down in Congress-ville, the tall and the small,
Was singing! Without any health reform at all!
The Congress didn’t care, a few were disgraces,
All they wanted, it seemed, was TV with their faces

And the Payor, with his Payor-feet knee deep in the muck,
Stood puzzling and puzzling: “Man, there goes my bucks.
It could be about healthcare! It could be global warming!
“It could be Al Qaeda, Afghanistan and desert storming”
And he puzzled three hours, `till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Payor thought of something he hadn’t before!
“Maybe Congress,” he thought, “simply needs a free ride.
“Maybe Congress,” he thought…just needs to look like they tried.

And what happened then…?
Well…in Congress-ville they say
That the Payor’s small wallet
Grew three sizes that day!
And the minute his wallet didn’t feel quite so tight,
He zoomed in his Benz passing through a red light
And he brought back the copies of the bill for reform!
And he……HE HIMSELF…!
The Payor calmed the whole storm!

New thoughts on EHR and ARRA money

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So, there I was, laying out my plans for 2012.  I had started training to become the first person to cross the English Channel on horseback, but I was having difficulty finding a company to sponsor me.  Given my reputation as a water-walker, several firms indicated they would sponsor me to walk it, but I have never been one to do things the easy way.

Scratch the horse idea.

Then it hit me.  I’ve decided to retrace the footsteps of the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl in his quest to travel from Peru to Pacific Polynesia on a raft made from natural materials.  His book Kon-Tiki narrates his 101 day journey.

But since balsa wood is scarce, I will need some other readily available material I can lash together to build my vessel.  (Have you figured out where this is headed?)

With so many broken EHRs littering the dustbins, I figured why not?  I bought them for pennies on the million and had them shipped to the seaport of Callao.  I hired a few systems integrators to integrate the various platforms; McKesson and EPIC formed the major components of the hull, and several copies of AllScripts served as decking.

Launch is set for April 1 of this year.  My backup plan in case this fails is to use all of the unclaimed ARRA money, convert it into single dollar bills, and lay it on the water in front of me, bill by bill, for 4,000 miles.  I know this is a bit extravagant, but I hate to see all that money go to waste.

Healthcare IT, let’s not lose site of the patient

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It is easy to remove oneself from what is important as we trade metaphorical tomatoes about what is wrong with EHR, what may happen to the healthcare reform, and why the nationwide health information network is DOA.

Debating healthcare IT on the Internet is an esoteric and antiseptic conversation, one with few if any catastrophic implications to anyone other than the person trying to sell a used, $100 million EHR on eBay.

We write about the fact that it is supposed to do something to benefit the patient. Is there a more sterile word than patient? Whether we use patient or patients, we keep it faceless, nameless, and ubiquitous. They do not have to be real for us to accomplish our task; in fact, I think we do our best work as long as we keep them at arm’s length.

[More:]

We calculate ROIs for EHR around people who exist to us only by their patient IDs.

What if these hominoid avatars turned out to be real people? What if indeed?

Recently I learned of a real patient; a friend, 37, mother of three. She has had lots of tests. They call it Myelodysplastic Syndromes. MDS sounds more polite. One would think that because it has its own acronym that might imply good news. It does not.

The thing I like best about Google is knowing that if an answer exists, I can find it. I may have to vary the syntax of the query a few times, but sooner or later I will find what I seek. The converse can be quite disquieting, especially if you happen to enter a phrase like, “survival rates for MDS.” After a few tries I realized that the reason I was not getting any hits to my query had nothing to do with poor syntax. It had everything to do with a lack of survivors.

“Last Christmas” is a rather strange title for a blog. In this instance the title has nothing to do with anything religious. It is simply a line in the sand, a statement with a high degree of probability. Unfortunately, “Last Christmas” does not have the same meaning as the phrase, “this past Christmas.”

My friend has had thirty-eight Christmases. Apparently, MDS is able to alter simple mathematical series. If presented with the numerical series 1, 2, 3. . .37, 38, 39, and if we were asked to supply the next number, we would all offer the wrong answer–40. In her case there may be no next number; the series will likely end with 39. That’s MDS math.

Then there are the three children, each one of them in the same grade as my three children. They will be learning a different version of MDS math. All the numerical series in their lives will reset and begin again with the value of one. First Christmas since mom died. First birthday since mom died. Every life event will be dated based on its relationship to an awful life-ending event.

It will be their B.C. and A.D.

EHR probably has very little value when you break it down to the level of an individual patient. Stalin said something like, “one death is a tragedy, and a thousand deaths is a statistic.” While it is unlikely that he was discussing patient outcomes, the import is the same.

Rule One: There are some awful diseases that will kill people.
Rule Two: Doctors are not allowed to change Rule One.

I guess it goes to show us that as we debate things that we view as being crucial components of whatever lies under the catch-all phrase of healthcare, when it comes down to someone you know who probably is not going to get better, some things do not seem very important.

How to recover your lost EHR productivity

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Success and failure are often separated by the slimmest of margins. Sometimes you have to be prepared to think on your feet to out think unfavorable circumstances. Sometimes success hinges on how you present your idea. It is possible to force the circumstances via rapid evolution to pass from problem, to possible solution, to believable, to heroic? I believe so.

Permit me to illustrate with frozen chicken. Several hours before dinner I threw the frozen chicken breasts into the sink, choosing to thaw them with water instead of the microwave. Some twenty minutes later while checking emails I wondered what we were having for dinner. Not to be outdone by own inadequacies, I remembered we were having chicken. I remembered that we were having chicken because I remembered turning on the hot water. The only thing I couldn’t remember was turning off the hot water.

I raced to the kitchen. My memory of having forgotten to turn off the water was correct. Grabbing every towel I could find, I soaked up the puddles from the hardwood flooring, thinking while mopping about how I might answer to my wife if she happened to return to a kitchen that looked like the Land of Lakes. My first reaction, admittedly poor, was to tell her that I thought the countertop wasn’t level and that the only way to know for sure was to see which direction the water ran. Telling her the truth never entered my mind.

Once the major puddles had been removed, I worked on version two of the story, quickly arriving at a version of the truth that seemed more palatable—tell her I decided to wash all the towels. Why not get bonus points instead of getting in trouble? Version three looked even better. Since I was wiping the floor with the towels, instead of telling her I washed the towels, why not double the bonus points? I decided to wash the floor, and wash the towels. Husband of the year can’t be far off.

A few hours have passed. The floor is dry—and clean, the towels are neatly folded and back in the linen closet, and the chicken is on the grill. All the bases covered. A difficult and embarrassing situation turned into a positive by quick thinking.

A few of you have asked, let’s say we buy into what you are saying, how do you propose we turn around the results of our EHR implementation? All kidding aside, it comes down to presentation. Clearly you can’t walk into a room with a bunch of slides showing that your EHR investment was wasted. Additionally you cannot hide the fact that your productivity is dropping faster than Congress’ favorability polling.

The first requirement to turn EHR infamy into fame is to halt the slide towards the EHR abyss.  Publically acknowledge that productivity is in the dumpster.  Think of it as an IT 12-step meeting; “Hi, my name is Paul, and my EHR project is killing us.”  See, that was not so difficult.  After all, everyone already knows about the productivity problem.  The only unanswered question is whether or not you are going to man-up and own the problem and own the solution.  If you don’t, they will find somebody who will.

Your EHR implementation broke new ground.  It may be the first time that automating a task has ever made the task take more time rather than less..

And what is the problem that requires fixing?  It is this.  The EHR being used by your doctors and nurses was never designed, it was coded, and that distinction has everything to do with why productivity has dropped.  Not a single business system designer ever researched how your EHR needed to work.  Nobody trained in cognitive psychology or human-computer interaction or content strategists ever watched the doctor-patient-nurse interaction and translated those observations into design specs for your EHR.  Ipso-facto, the amount of time required to complete each patient visit has increased, and since the number of hours in a day remained constant, the number of patients that can be seen in a day has decreased.

The time has come to define a plan to recover the lost productivity.

So, how did my chicken dinner turn out? I was feeling confident that I had sidestepped to worst of it. Overconfident, as it turned out. My son hollered from the basement, “Dad, why is all this water down here?”

 

EHR’s marmalade-and-toast hypothesis

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Les choses son contre nous—things are against us.  EHR is the marmalade-and-toast hypothesis, that the marmalade-side will land on the carpet when the toast falls from the breakfast plate, played out in bits and bytes.  Resistentialism is the belief that inanimate objects have a natural antipathy towards human beings.  If one were to view the marmalade-toast through the glasses of resistentialism one would conclude that the likelihood of the toast laying marmalade-side down increases with the cost of the carpet. So it is with the EHR.  Your expensive EHR is laying marmalade-side down on a very expensive carpet.

EHR has created an air of technostalgia with users yearning for the bygone days when the technology involved a number two pencil and a pad of paper.  Now that you are using your EHR system, do you ever wonder how different the experience of using it would have been if someone had asked for your input about what the EHR should do?  Would merely asking have solved the EHR myopia that was brought about by those who implemented it, implemented it without involving a single systems designer?

That this problem even exists is demonstrated by the fact that to use the EHR required hours of training.  Users sat there like sock puppets listening to the buzzword-bingo put forth by the trainers.  This should have been the clue that none of what they were about to learn was intuitive or self-evident.  The reason they offer EHR training is to explain “This is how you get the system to do what you need it to do,” because without viewing it that way it will not do anything.

The EHR has turned a lot of normally complacent physicians and nurses into stress puppies.  To understand how far amiss the functioning of the EHR is from what the users had hoped it would be all one has to do is observe it being used.  How many doctors and nurses have apologized to a patient during an exam because of something related to the EHR?  “Sorry this is taking so long…If you will just bear with me while I figure out how to do this…When the nurse returns I will get her to show me how to schedule your next appointment.”

If ever there was a time to have employed defensive pessimism, the implementation of EHR was such a time.  Users went into the project skeptimistic, certain it would go badly.  As niche worriers doctors and nurses imagined all the ways that the EHR would under deliver and would make their jobs more difficult, and they watched their stress portfolios rise.  The forgotten task was that nobody mapped out ways to avert the damage.

That this jump-the-shark problem can and should be corrected by something not much larger than a two-pizza team—a team small enough that it can be fed by two pizzas—seems to have escaped the reason of many.

Many are guilty of treating the productivity drop brought on by EHR as a problem with no solution.  If a problem has no solution it is not a problem, it is a fact.  And if it is a fact it is not to be solved, but coped with over time.  There is way too much coping going on.

The EHR productivity drop can be undone.  It will not be undone by redoing the training.  It will be undone by assessing the human factors and user experiences of those using the EHR, by researching how they users want to use it, and by reconfiguring the user interface.

This is not cheap, but it is much less expensive than the cost of loss productivity.

 

The Real Reason Your EHR Failed, And What To Do About It

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This is the title for my new blog at healthsystemcio.com. I would love to read what you think

http://healthsystemcio.com/2011/11/18/the-real-reason-your-ehr-failed-and-what-to-do-about-it/

EHR: What questions remain unanswered?

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“We need to talk about your TSP reports.”  Office Space—Possibly the best movie ever made. Ever worked for a boss like Lumbergh? Here’s a smart bit of dialog for your Wednesday.

Peter Gibbons: I work in a small cubicle. I uh, I don’t like my job, and, uh, I don’t think I’m gonna go anymore.

Joanna: You’re just not gonna go?

Peter Gibbons: Yeah.

Joanna: Won’t you get fired?

Peter Gibbons: I don’t know, but I really don’t like it, and, uh, I’m not gonna go.

Joanna: So you’re gonna quit?

Peter Gibbons: Nuh-uh. Not really. Uh… I’m just gonna stop going.

Joanna: When did you decide all that?

Peter Gibbons: About an hour ago.

Joanna: Oh, really? About an hour ago… so you’re gonna get another job?

Peter Gibbons: I don’t think I’d like another job.

Joanna: Well, what are you going to do about money and bills and…

Peter Gibbons: You know, I’ve never really liked paying bills. I don’t think I’m gonna do that, either.

One more tidbit:

Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door – that way

Lumbergh can’t see me, heh heh – and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.

Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?

Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

I like to think of Peter as my alter-ego.

When I’m playing me in a parallel universe, I’m reading about a surfer dude cum freelance physicist, Garrett Lisi. Even the title of his theory, “An exceptionally simple theory of everything,” seems oxymoronic. He surfs Hawaii and does physics things—physicates—in Tahoe. (I just invented that word; it’s the verb form of doing physics, physicates.)

Ignoring that I can’t surf, and know very little physics, I like to think that Garrett and I have a lot in common. I already know Peter Gibbons and I do. So, where does this take us?

It may be apparent that I look at EHR from a different perspective than many of others involved in this debate; I’m the guy who doesn’t mind yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. The guy who will never be invited to speak at the HIT convention unless they need a heretic to burn for the evening entertainment. I can live with that.

Like Garrett, I too see an exceptionally simple theory in everything, especially when it comes to improving business. It’s not rocket surgery, but then, it was never meant to be. You’ve seen the people running it, they are definitely not rocket surgeons—before someone writes, I know it should be scientists.

Sometimes I like to look at the problem from a different dementia—Word didn’t have a problem with that usage. I look at the productivity loss brought about by EHR and ask myself three questions:

1. Why do people really believe that retraining the end users will help–training them did nothing good for productivity?

2. Why are many hospitals thinking that scrapping their EHR and putting in a new one will improve productivity?

3. Why are their no major initiatives to recapture the lost productivity?

What do you think?

EHR’s Kitchen Table Amateurs (KTAs)

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So I’m making dinner the other night and I’m reminded of a story I heard a while back on NPR. The narrator and his wife were telling stories about their 50 year marriage, some of the funny memories they shared which helped keep them together. One of the stories the husband related was about his wife’s meatloaf. Their recipe for meatloaf was one they had learned from his wife’s mother. Over the years they had been served meatloaf at the home of his in-laws on several occasions, and on most of those occasions his wife would help her mom prepare the meatloaf. She’d mix the ingredients in a large wooden bowl; 1 pound each of ground beef and ground pork, breadcrumbs, two eggs, some milk, salt, pepper, oregano, and a small can of tomato paste. She’d knead the mixture together, shape into a loaf, and place the loaf into the one-and-a-half pound pan, discarding the leftover mixture. She would then pour a mixture of tomato paste and water, along with diced carrots and onions on top of the two loaf, and then garnish it with strips of bacon.

He went on to say that meatloaf night at home was one of his favorite dinners. His wife always prepared the dish exactly as she had learned from her mother. One day he asked her why she threw away the extra instead of cooking it all. She replied that she was simply following her mother’s recipe.  The husband said, “The reason your mom throws away part of the meatloaf is because she doesn’t own a two-pound baking pan. We have a two pound pan. You’ve been throwing it away all of these years and I’ve never known why until now.”

Therein lays the dilemma. We get so used to doing things one way that we forget to question whether there may a better way to do the same thing. Several of you have inquired as to how to incorporate some of the EHR strategy ideas in your organization, how to get out of the trap of continuing to do something the same way it’s been done, simply because that’s the way things are done. It’s difficult to be the iconoclast, someone who attacks the cherished beliefs of the organization. It is especially difficult without a methodology and an approach. Without a decent methodology, and some experience to shake things up, we’re no better off than a kitchen table amateur (KTA). A KTA, no matter how well-intentioned, won’t be able to affect change. The end results would be no better than sacrificing three goats and a chicken.

So, think about how to define the problem, how to find a champion, and how to put together a plan to enable you to move the focus to developing a proper strategy, one that will be flexible enough to adapt to the changing requirements. But keep the goats and the chicken handy just in case this doesn’t work.

EHR: How trained users killed productivity

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In order to complete today’s lesson you will need one prop, your EHR vendor contract. I will pause for a moment—please let us know when you are ready to proceed.  Ready?

Now, turn to the section with all of the commas and zeroes, that is right, it is probably labeled pricing.  Skim down until you see the line item for training.  Got it?  It is a rather substantial number is it not?  And that number is simply the number your vendor is charging you to train your people.  Your actual training costs are probably double or triple that amount.

Why?  Because there is an opportunity cost for each hour of time one of your employees spends in training to use the EHR.  It is an hour they are not spending doing what they were hired to do.  Now I know some of you are thinking ‘Only Roemer will try to make a big deal out of EHR training.  Goodness knows, he has come down hard on everything else associated with EHR,” and you are probably correct.

Gartner suggests that for an average ERP project firms should budget seventeen percent of the total project cost to training end-users.  Seventeen percent.  I can hear the CFOs gnashing their respective teeth.  Knowing that EHR is at least as disruptive to the organization, and will have more users than ERP, let us agree that a good rule of thumb for training costs for EHR is fifteen percent of the total cost of the EHR project.  When you factor in the opportunity cost of 2X the number starts to get pretty big.

We all can name hospitals whose EHR project cost north of one hundred million dollars.  Who are we trying to kid; we can name hospitals whose cost was way north of that figure.  Looking back at your vendor contract I am willing to bet that nobody budgeted training at or around fifteen percent of the total cost of the project.

Is that a bad thing?  No.  Why?  EHR projects are not failing as a result of hospitals not spending enough on end-user training.  I know that statement flies in the face of conventional IT wisdom, but here is my thinking behind that statement.

Training is designed to get the end-users to use the EHR the way the EHR is intended to be used.  And that is not a good thing.  Whoa big fella.  Don’t believe me?  Just look at your EHR productivity numbers.  Didn’t productivity nose-dive once you required your trained end-users to use the EHR?  Still don’t believe me, ask your physicians and nurses.

Why not train everybody again, wouldn’t that help?  What did Einstein say about the definition of insanity?  Insanity is doing something over and expecting different results.  If the hospital already spent fifteen million dollars to train the end-users on the EHR, and the result was a twenty percent drop in productivity, might it not be time to say enough already?

EHR adage 101: When you are in a hole stop digging.

The EHR project summary for many hospitals reads a little like this:

  • EHR cost               $100,000,000
  • Training cost          $15,000,000
  • Opportunity cost $15,000,000
  • Productivity loss 20%
  • Cost of productivity loss—priceless

Face it; you spent millions of dollars to be worse off than you already were.

Today I spoke with the CFO of a hospital that owned one of those hundred million dollar EHRs.  His question to me was whether or not he should hire the EHR vendor or a large, expensive system integrator to help him recapture the productivity loss.  I told him no.  Why?  All the EHR vendor will do is to retrain your people, and you have already proven that training your people to use the EHR brought about the productivity loss.  After all, it wasn’t untrained users who did it.  Why not hire a systems integrator for tens of millions to reimplement the system?  Because I bet you put the system in correctly in the first place.

If training is not the reason productivity is low and a poor implementation is not the reason, what is?  Productivity is low because the hundred million dollar EHR never included a single dollar of resource to design it around how your physicians and nurses function.  Your expensive EHR was built to answer the question of what needs to be done; it was not designed to deal with the issue of how something is to be done.  At best, the only input the hospital had, if it had even this much, was a list of functional requirements that was handed over to a bunch of coders.  I am willing to bet in most cases even this did not happen because all of the EHR code was already written.  The EHR is not productive because it was never designed for your organization.

It is never too late to incorporate design into a business system, but remember, neither IT nor the EHR vendors are designers, and you have already seen their results.

Help has arrived for your EHR productivity loss

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I was thinking about the time I was teaching rappelling in the Rockies during the summer between my two years of graduate school.  The camp was for high school students of varying backgrounds and their counselors.  On more than one occasion, the person on the other end of my rope would freeze and I would have to talk them down safely.

Late in the day, a thunderstorm broke quickly over the mountain, causing the counselor on my rope to panic.  No amount of talking was going to get her to move either up or down, so it was up to me to rescue her.  I may have mentioned in a prior post that my total amount of rappelling experience was probably no more than a few more hours than hers.  Nonetheless, I went off belay, and within seconds, I was shoulder to shoulder with her.

The sky blackened, and the wind howled, raining bits of rock on us.  I remember that only after I locked her harness to mine did she begin to relax.  She needed to know that she didn’t have to go this alone, and she took comfort knowing someone was willing to help her.

That episode reminds me of a story I heard about a man who fell in a hole—if you know how this turns out, don’t tell the others.  He continues to struggle but can’t find a way out.  A CFO walks by.  When the man pleads for help the CFO writes a check and drops it in the hole.  A while later the vendor walks by—I know this isn’t the real story, but it’s my blog and I’ll tell it any way I want.  Where were we?  The vendor.  The man pleads for help and the vendor pulls out the contract, reads it, circles some obscure item in the fine print, tosses it in the hole, and walks on.

I walk by and see the man in the hole.  “What are you doing there?”  I asked.

“I fell in the hole and don’t know how to get out.”

I felt sorry for the man—I’m naturally empathetic—so I hopped into the hole.  “Why did you do that?  Now we’re both stuck.”

“I’ve been down here before” I said, “And I know the way out.”

I know that’s a little sappy and self-serving.  However, before you decide it’s more comfortable to stay in the hole with your EHR productivity loss and hope nobody notices, why not see if there’s someone who knows the way out?

Merely appointing someone to run your EHR effort doesn’t do anything other than add a name to an org chart.