PMO

IT Vendors: What’s not to like?

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We were being entertained at a friend’s house whose interior looked like it had been designed by one of those overly made up, energetic divorcees who only take cash.  The walls were painted a stark white; the overstuffed club chairs and the couch were upholstered in a soft white leather.  The white carpet was thick enough to hide a chiwawa.

The hostess locked askance at me when she saw me seated in the club chair.  Perhaps my outfit did not look good on white.  A paperback which looked out of place lay on the end table next to my glass of Ovaltine.   I picked it up and began to read the back cover to get a feel for the storyline…which got me thinking about writing and authors.

The paperback story filled five hundred and seventeen pages.  Whether they were well-written, whether there was a story nestled inside, could only be learned by reading the book.  I read many books, and I read often, especially when I travel.  When I am unprepared I am forced to purchase a book at one of the shops in the airport concourse.  The purchase decision lasts only as long as it takes to read the back cover—the publisher’s only chance to make a first and last impression.

Those first impressions have fooled me often.  Ten minutes into the book I wind up stuffing it into the kangaroo pouch in the seatback in front of me.  More often than I would like, I find that the person who wrote the book summary on the back flap is a better writer than the person who wrote the book.  The summary writer is able to create an interest in the story and a need to see how it ends, an interest and need for which the book’s author is unable to deliver.

The book is rarely better than the back cover suggests it will be.  Often it is as good, sometimes it is not.  The book summary is the upper limit for what you can expect by way of enjoyment.

It works the same way in business only instead of paperback books they use brochures.  Never trust the brochure.  Whatever is written in the vendor’s brochure is the upper limit of what you can expect to receive.  Those who remember the dismantling of nuclear arms remember the adage ‘Trust, but verify.”  When it comes to dealing with vendors, I suggest ignoring the part about trusting.

Take software vendors for example.  What’s not to like?

The product never leaves you feeling the way you felt after reading the brochure.  Remember the photos?  Attractive people, smartly dressed, ethnically diverse.  Their teeth bleached so white the reflection of the monitor is visible in their incisors.  Seated in their clutter-free offices, they are all smiling.

Did your users look like them when they started to use the product?  Did you get your brochure moment?  In order to find customers, vendors have to position their product in the most positive light.

Maybe there should be a cigarette-like warning printed on every software vendor’s brochure, something like this:

  • We hired the people pictured in the brochure—nobody is ever that happy
  • Most of you will never learn how to use all of the functionality
  • To have any chance of getting the software to do what you need it to do will probably cost you twice as much as you contracted
  • There is no way you will implement in the timeframe you discussed

They know, and we know, nobody implements brochures.  If we did, IT departments would be much smaller.  Maybe that is why vendors give away pens and T-shirts to all of their customers, to soften their sense of guilt.

When IT projects Fail

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The mind is a terrible thing.  Last night I stumbled across part of the movie Kill Bill Volume 2. There is a character in Volume 2 named Esteban Vihaio, an eighty-something Hispanic bon vivant.  His is a small role, but performed beautifully.  Uma Thurman, our ninja protagonist, meets Esteban and asks him ‘Where’s Bill?”

With a thick, refined Spanish accent, Esteban repeats the question, drawing out Bill’s name “Where is Beeeeeeel?”

Anyway, today I am on the phone.  And can you guess the name of the person with whom I am speaking?  That’s right, I was talking to Beeeeeeel.  He did not have a Spanish accent; nonetheless, I could not stop the voices in my head from trying to translate every phrase so that it sounded like Mr. Esteban.  Needless to say, the call went downhill rapidly.

When I think about software implementations the phrase “Help, I’ve failed and I can’t get up” comes to mind.

For many people, the goal of a software implementation is to get to the end, to see the vendor leave.  In many minds, that event signals that the work is done, and the departure of the vendor signals that the software was implemented correctly.  Not true Mon Chéri.

In case you did not get the email, IT has become big business in most corporations, and it takes a group of highly paid bureaucrats to administer it.  And you know what happens when you give the bureaucrat a clipboard and ask them to oversee the implementation of a new email system, by the time the dust settles you have spent a few million dollars on a new sales force automation tool—Rube Goldberg on steroids.

Once you start spending it is difficult to stop.  And people do not keep spending in the hope of reaping additional ROI; they do so in order to try to salvage a project that in its current state is a white elephant.  Most of the cost of an IT project is to get it to do what you thought it would do.  This is a classic example of when you are in a hole, stop digging, or at least let me hand you a bigger shovel.

Project Management’s Biggest Mistake

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Today’s headlines; Paula Dean drops two pants sizes and, based on six years of research in the Pacific Northwest, graduate researchers at Chicago’s School of Anthropology have confirmed that in fact, consultants do eat their young.

Observation may be one of our best teachers, but we often ignore what can be learned from it.  Here is a real-life example that occurred to me from having watched a human interest story on the local news about neighbors banding together to try and rescue someone’s pet cat which they surmised was stuck in a tree.

Here is the observation; how many cat skeletons have you seen in trees?  What can be learned?  Maybe cats do not need rescuing.

Project management and business in general have many similarities with cats stuck in trees.  Somebody thinks there is a problem, and like good little workers, we throw resources at the problem trying to rescue it.  We establish committees, have meetings, and create reports.  We discuss the problem, we recall what happened the last time we had this type of problem, we bring in experts whose skills are particularly attuned to solving this problem, and then we attack it.

The one thing we fail to do is to validate whether the perceived problem is really a problem.  Chances are that the cat in the tree is doing just fine and does not require any help. If it does, there is always gravity.

 

EHR’s Two Types of Failure at your Hospital

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"Kinetic productivity"

I have been rereading John Eldredge’s book Wild at Heart.  It seems his purpose for the book is to help men cope with their feelings of not measuring up to their father’s expectations.  It delivers its punch at much the same level as the last scene in the film Field of Dreams when the father and son have a chance for one last catch.

(I am pausing parenthetically for a moment for the men to wipe their collective eyes.)

Here comes the segue, so hold on to your EHRs.  Let us spend some time dealing with lost opportunity and failure.  What if we define two types of failures; kinetic failure and potential failure?

Kinetic Failure: the failure to achieve the possible

Potential Failure: the failure to achieve the probable

Viewed from the perspective of productivity, let us define X to represent the service provider’s pre-EHR productivity; the distance from P to A represents the productivity loss brought about by the EHR, and the distance from A to K represents the opportunity loss.

P——————————A—————————K

One can argue with some degree of reason that the purchase of an EHR was made with the reasonable assumption that in addition to improving quality and patient safety the EHR would improve productivity to some degree.  In fact, assuming the provider did any sort of cost benefit analysis or return on investment calculation, any ROI, if it exists lives somewhere along the path between A and K.

If productivity is not improved, the service provider incurs an opportunity loss, a kinetic failure. At that point the best a service provider can hope to achieve is to not suffer a productivity loss.

One can also argue that the purchase of an EHR was made with the reasonable assumption that the implementation of EHR would not reduce productivity.

In many service providers EHR has resulted in a double hit to productivity; not only did they not achieve the productivity gains that were possible, they lost productivity.  A lot of people raise complaints when they speak about how much productivity costs.  One thing that is for certain, productivity costs a lot less than lost productivity.

This lost productivity, the kinetic failure, is the elephant in the service provider’s waiting room.  It has been poking its trunk through the door, and the only thing it wants once it gets its trunk through the door is to get all the way in the room.

Well, it is in the room, all the way in.

Part of the confusion facing providers is due to the fact that no matter how bad the productivity loss, a provider can still qualify as a meaningful user. That fact has led many providers to believe that since they can still qualify as such, that perhaps the productivity loss cannot be all bad news.

Let us look at a real example from a client of mine, a hundred and forty physician practice.  This practice had hit a barrier in terms of its ability to add patients, doctors, and staff.  It was running consistently an hour to an hour and a half behind with its patients.

The practice spent millions to implement an EHR.  Several months post implementation the practice was still running an hour behind.  Automating bad practices resulted in only one thing; the bad practices were completed faster.

To have any hope of avoiding kinetic failure and potential failure a healthcare practice must address how it runs its business.  Some business processes are duplicative, some are outdated, and some are wasteful.

Every one of those eats away at possible and probable productivity.  EHR was not designed to be a productivity windfall, but it clearly shines a spotlight on lost productivity.

Fortunately, even if your EHR has led to a productivity loss, all is not lost. Kinetic productivity can be regained, and potential productivity can be captured.  The path to productivity slices right through how the EHR is being used.  User Experience, UX, and usability, can and should be examined, redesigned and deployed.  This is not for the squeamish as it will cut through constraints like ‘We can’t do that’ and ‘We have always done it this way.’

Can’t and always must become productivity’s road kill.

The Cat in the Hat’s EHR Philosophy

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My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives. (Hedley Lamar—that’s Hedley)

Let’s see if we can tie this collection of thoughts into something that won’t waste your time or mine.

The sun did not shine.  It was too wet to play.  So I sat in the house all that cold, cold, wet day.  It was too wet to go out and too cold to play ball, so I sat in the house and did nothing at all. (Dr. Seuss)  It was around that time when my wife decided maybe this whole sitting around thing wasn’t optimizing my time, so she decided “we”—which can also be interpreted to mean “me”—should caulk the master shower.  Personally, I thought that why God invented the Yellow Pages, you know, the whole thing about, “Let your fingers do the walking.”

I notice we just blew through an entire paragraph without accomplishing anything.  Sorry.  I got my designer tool belt, the same one I’ve had for twenty years—still looks the same as the day I bought it.  Today’s Roemer Minute—the less you know about what you’re doing, the more important it is to dress the part.  (This does not seem to work with the people whom I’ve told that I’m studying cardiology.)

Tool belt.  Tools—caulk taker-outer, caulk puter-inner.  Paper towels—the need for these will become clear.  Worse case, this is a ten minute job, but if I finish too quickly, there will be additional assignments coming my way.  The trick with caulking is that the success or failure can all come down to how much of the plastic tip you circumcise (can I say that on TV?).  Too much and caulk is everywhere, not enough and it is nowhere.  I made the incision and started to lay down the first bead.  It was quickly apparent that I should have used clear caulk as the white stuff stared back at me like bleached bones—I try and add a little medical flavor wherever I can.

I’ve watched the same shows as you.  Sometimes people spread the caulk with a tool, others prefer a wet finger.  I am equally unskilled with both, so I went with the finger method, smoothing the caulk into the joint.  I wipe my sticky white finger on the paper towel, place the towel on the limestone tile, and return to work, only to notice that although the caulk looks good, my finger created to parallel lines of caulk on either side of the repair, sort of like a snow plow does.  I grab another piece of paper towel and begin the process of trying to remove the excess caulk, finally tossing the paper towel to the side.

Fast forward twenty minutes.  The caulking is done.  My hands are so white it looks like I am wearing a pair of Mickey’s gloves.  (That’s spelled M-O-U-S-E.)  As I wipe my hands with a used piece of towel—there are no more clean ones—I unknowingly step on one of the pieces.  The piece sticks to my shoe.  I retrieve the other pieces and notice that the caulk which had been on the paper towels is now spread all over the tile like someone had a food fight with smores.

Whatever I touched only exacerbated the problem.  I am immediately reminded of the Dr. Seuss book, “The cat in the hat comes back.”  In the book, the cat goes from good intentions to spreading a pink stain over everything—sort of like me with the caulk.

Sometimes good intentions don’t add up to much.  I’d wager that everyone in the EHR process has good intentions.  Sometimes it’s more important to pair good intentions with good skills.  Let’s call EHR one of those sometimes.  Good intentions are okay up to the point when you’re dealing with two or more commas on the cost side.

Here is today’s thought, the one reason you keep coming back to this site. Why did you implement EHR?  The answer will surprise you.  You did it for one simple reason, to get people, doctors and nurses, to do what you want them to do and to do it in a way you want them to do it.  EHR will modify their behavior.  I am sure yours did, but did it modify it in the way you wanted?

Most times it’s good to call a professional before you start tracking caulk across the floor.

Why IT projects Fail

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The mind is a terrible thing.  Last night I stumbled across part of the movie Kill Bill Volume 2. There is a character in Volume 2 named Esteban Vihaio, an eighty-something Mexican—for lack of a more erudite word—pimp.  His is a small role, but performed beautifully.  Uma Thurman, our ninja protagonist, meets Esteban and asks him ‘Where’s Bill?”

With a thick, refined Spanish accent, Esteban repeats the question, drawing out the name “Where is Beeeeeeel?”

Anyway, today I am on the phone.  And can you guess the name of the person with whom I am speaking?  That’s right, I was talking to Beeeeeeel.  He did not have a Spanish accent; nonetheless, I could not stop the voices in my head from trying to translate every phrase so that it sounded like Mr. Esteban.  Needless to say, the call went downhill rapidly.

When I think about software implementations the phrase “Help, I’ve failed and I can’t get up” comes to mind.

For many people, the goal of a software implementation is to get to the end, to see the vendor leave.  In many minds, that signals that the work is done, and the departure of the vendor signals that the software was implemented correctly.  Not true Mon Chéri.

In case you did not get the email, IT has become big business in most corporations, and it takes a group of highly paid bureaucrats to administer it.  And you know what happens when you give the bureaucrat a clipboard and ask them to oversee the implementation of a new email system, by the time the dust settles you have spent a few million dollars on a new sales force automation tool—Rube Goldberg on steroids.

Once you start spending it is difficult to stop.  And people do not keep spending in the hope of reaping additional ROI; they do so in order to try to salvage a project that in its current state is a white elephant.  Most of the cost of an IT project is to get it to do what you thought it would do.  This is a classic example of when you are in a hole, stop digging, or at least let me hand you a bigger shovel.

Step away from the computer

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Our middle school child is in the middle of a family consumer science project (home economics) to organize one room in our home.  He has redefined the project so that he reorganizes during commercials, and he is seven hours into a project involving our walk-in closet.

While watching the news it occurred to me that something is missing from my life, I do not belong to a gang, not even a little one.  So, I have decided to start one, a white collar gang of consultants.  A rough and tumbled, manicured group of professionals.

Instead of gang emblem, I am thinking each member of the gang will have their own embossed business card.  We will come up with creative gang nicknames.  For myself I am vacillating between ‘Dr. Knowledge’ and ‘The Voice of Reason.’  Instead of Harleys, we will roll through town to our national rallies on monogrammed Segways, and instead of leathers we will dress in Armani.

Mothers will hide their children from us as we power noiselessly down Main Street at four miles an hour, and their CPA husbands will turn green with envy.  We might not win many fights, but we will have the satisfaction of knowing we are smarter than those who beat us to a bloody pulp.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?

There are days when it doesn’t pay to be a  serial malingerer, and when it does, the work is only part time, but I hear the benefits may be improving as I think I heard somebody mention healthcare is being reformed.

I don’t know if you are aware of it, but there are actually people who have taken an Alfred E. Newman, “What, me worry” attitude towards EHR.  For the youngsters in the crowd, Alfred was the poster child for Mad Magazine, not Mad Men.

Just to be contrarian for a moment–as though that’s out of character for me–most providers have no need to fear–does this happen to you?  You are writing aloud, trying to make a point, and the one thing that pops into your mind after, ‘there’s no need to fear’ is “Underdog is here.”

Anyway, since many providers haven’t begun the process, or even begun to understand the process, there is still time for them to lessen the risk of failure from an EHR perspective.  Many don’t want to talk about it, the risk of failure.

Here’s another data set worth a look (The Chaos Report).  They went a little PC on us calling them ‘Impaired” factors.  EHR impairment.  Step away from the computer if you are impaired, and take away your friend’s logon if they are.  These are failure factors.

Project Impaired Factors % of  the Responses
1. Incomplete Requirements 13.1%
2. Lack of User Involvement 12.4%
3. Lack of Resources 10.6%
4. Unrealistic Expectations 9.9%
5. Lack of Executive Support 9.3%
6. Changing Requirements & Specifications 8.7%
7. Lack of Planning 8.1%
8. Didn’t Need It Any Longer 7.5%
9. Lack of IT Management 6.2%
10. Technology Illiteracy 4.3%
11. Other 9.9%

My take on this is with overall “failures” so high, several respondents could have replied to “all of the above.”  Also of note is that these failure reasons differ from the ones listed previously.

Who knows, maybe if we multiply them by minus one we can call them success factors.

Healthcare IT meets Ben & Jerry’s

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The idea for this blog came about after reading a PowerPoint presentation by Doctor Alberto Borges.  All mistakes can be attributed to me.

When one is witness to the number of external influencers trying to shape policy on healthcare, reform, and healthcare IT, the best one can hope for is that hidden somewhere under the pile is a pony.

But let’s be real—the pony has suffocated.

While it is okay to point the finger of blame at the usual suspects—payors, lobbyists, and the lawmakers—let us not forget to ensure to point out the role paid by the healthcare IT applications vendors.

“Who me?” You ask.

Decrease costs, increase quality, decrease errors.  I did not invent these words; they are written on your websites.

Prior to 2008 the value of EHR vendors’ stocks plummeted.  Look at them now.  How does one explain the difference?  Can the gains be attributed to vendors having rewritten their applications?  New technological innovations?  If not, what else could it be?

Meaningful Use.  Meaningful Use tied to Medicare payments and a twenty billion dollar incentive to get providers to do something they otherwise would not have done.  Could life be any better if you are sitting in the EHR Tower’s corner office?

What if we think about the issue this way?  Let us suppose all of the leading ice cream manufacturers lobbied Congress to push for including ice cream machines in all new cars starting in 2012…silly idea, but then again, so is Meaningful Use.  Not only do the ice cream machines have to be installed, but they have to be able to communicate with one another.  That way, if I happen to rent a car, the ice cream machine in my rental will already know what type of ice cream I like to eat.

Now we already know that no car buyers and no car builders will think much of being forced to buy or make cars with pre-installed ice cream makers.  But, perhaps there is a way around that.  Maybe in some self-serving way the Cookies and Cream lobby can convince Washington of the merits of pushing through their agenda.

Time passes, and still the idea is not getting much purchase.  What happens next?  The ice cream manufactures get Congress to pass the Ice Cream Tech Act—ICTA.  And as part of the ICTA Act, Ben and Jerrys, Baskin Robbins, and Haagen Dazs convince our friends to offer the auto manufacturers a twenty-billion dollar rebate for building cars with built-in ice cream makers—ICTA Initiatives.

Now, why would the Ben’s and Jerry’s do this?  Good question.  They will do this because they know that without offering a large financial incentive the car company executives will not do what they want them to do.  Now to insert ice cream makers, you can imagine that the car companies will have to go way off message, will have to change their strategy, and will have to incur all sorts of costs that have nothing to do with selling cars.

And that brings us back to the start of this story.  There is a reason why EHR vendors needed to lobby Congress to put forth more than twenty billion dollars of lottery money, and that reason is healthcare providers would not be doing EHR the Meaningful Use way unless there was a monetary reason to do it.  There certainly is no business reason to do it.

And for the most part, if providers calculate an ROI on EHR, even factoring in the incentive payments, there is still no reasonable financial argument that can be made.  In fact, when the cost to meet Meaningful Use is factored in, the financial argument worsens.

So, what will happen?  Here is what we know so far.  The Meaningful Use deadlines draw closer, meaning there is less time left to get the incentive dollars.  Implementations of EHR continue to falter, be redone, and under deliver.  The result is that the purchase of EHR systems will slow, and many EHRs will be uninstalled.  When there is no time left to get the incentive dollars, only then will EHR implementations be driven by the needs of the providers, and the government will no longer be driving the process.

 

EHR: the wisdom of crowds

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According to National Geographic, a single ant or bee isn’t smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems. The ability of animal groups—such as this flock of starlings—to shift shape as one, even when they have no leader, reflects the genius of collective behavior—something scientists are now tapping to solve human problems.  Two monumental achievements happened this week; someone from MIT developed a mathematical model that mimics the seemingly random behavior of a flight of starlings, and I reached the halfway point in counting backwards from infinity–the number–infinity/2.

Swarm theory. The wisdom of crowds. Contrast that with the ignorance of many to listen to those crowds. In the eighties it took Coca-Cola many months before they heard what the crowd was saying about New Coke. Where does healthcare EHR fit with all of this? I’ll argue that the authors of the public option felt that wisdom.  If you remember the movie Network, towards the end of the movie the anchorman–in this case it was a man, not an anchor person–besides, in the eighties, nobody felt the need it add he/she or it as some morphed politically correct collection of pronouns.  Whoops, I digress.  Where were we?  Oh yes, the anchor-person.  He/she or it went to the window and exhorted everyone to yell, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”  Pretty soon, his entire audience had followed his lead.

So, starting today, I begin my search for starlings.  A group whose collective wisdom may be able to help shape the healthcare EHR debate.  The requirements for membership is a willingness to leave the path shaped by so few and trodden by so many, to come to a fork in the road and take it. Fly in a new flock.  A flock that says before we get five years down the road and discover that we have created such an unbelievable mess that not only can we not use it, but that we have to write-off the entire effort and redo it, let us at least evaluate whether a strategic change is warranted.  The mess does not lie at the provider level.  It lies in the belief that hundreds of sets of different standards can be married to hundreds of different applications, and then to hundreds of different Rhios.

Where are the starlings headed?  Great question, as it is not sufficient simply to say, “you’re going the wrong way”.  I will write about some of my ideas on that later today.  Please share yours.

Now, when somebody asks you why you strayed from the pack, it would be good to offer a reasoned response.  It’s important to be able to stay on message.  Reform couldn’t do that and look where it is. Here are bullet points you can write on a little card, print, laminate, and keep in your wallet if you are challenged.

  • Different standards
  • Different vendors
  • Different Rhios
  • No EHR Czar

Different Standards + Different Vendors + Different Rhios + No Decider = Failure

You know this, I know this.

To know whether your ready to fly in a new direction, ask yourself this question.  Do you believe that under the present framework you will be able to walk into any ER in the country and know with certainty that they can quickly and accurately retrieve all the medical information they need about you?  If you do, keep drinking the Kool Aid.  If your a starling, come fly with us and get the word out.  Now return your seat backs and tray tables to their upright and most uncomfortable positions.

One thing your IT vendor will never tell you

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Permit me to let you in on a little secret—most firms have no idea how to manage their IT applications vendors.

In turn, this means they are managing you.  By the way, this is a bad thing.

The best way I have found to understand this problem is to liken what IT vendors tell you to what magicians tell their audience.  Bear with me.  If you have ever attended a magic show or watched one on television you will note that the best magicians tell you prior to their performance that they are going to lie to you.  In order for a magician’s performance to work on you any magician has to get you to suspend your belief.

A magician tells the audience that everything else you are about to hear and see is a lie.  And then they tell you they are going to cut someone in half, they do it, and your eyes are so amazed that somehow your brain forgets the bit about being lied to, about being led down a path of suspending your beliefs.

The difference between magicians and IT vendors is that IT vendors forget to mention at the outset—or at any other time—that not everything they tell you is true.  Things like what their system will cost, what it will do and how long it will take.

And because they do not tell you they are lying, once you have suspended your belief, you forget to unsuspend it.  Hence, you are caught up in their fantasy world and you foolishly believe what they tell you.

For the most part, IT vendors are not the people you want next to you in the EHR, ERP, or any IT foxhole.  In the dog-eat-lemming world of IT, never forget that the term ‘partner’ is an oxymoron.  IT is a business and the goal of every business is to maximize profits.  The best ways to maximize profits are to reduce costs and to increase revenues.  The only way to do so is for vendors to increase your costs.

Keep your eyes and ears open the next time your vendor offers to cut someone in half.