EHR

EHR leadership isn’t always a democracy

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CocoaPuffs

Cerealizable.

That’s my new word. I coined it the last time my wife was traveling and I was in charge of breakfast and making sure nobody missed the bus. Cerealizable is what happens when you walk into the kitchen and are confronted with two hungry dogs, three hungry kids, hair that needs brushing, homework assignments that need to be reviewed, and lunches that have to be packed.

Breakfast orders are shouted at me across the room as though I’m their short-order cook; pancakes, French toast, sausage, and who knows what else. What does one do? I was quickly headed down the path of self destruction, too many tasks and not enough taskers. I needed a light at the end of the tunnel and so I created one. I cerealized the problem; simplified it–turned into something I could solve. Go to the pantry, pull out the cardboard cereal boxes, three bowls, three spoons, and the gallon of milk. Check off breakfast.

In case you’re wondering, Cocoa Puffs still turn the milk brown, just like they did thirty years ago. Lunch orders began to be shouted across the bowls of cereal. Ham and cheese, PB&J, tuna–extra mayo, no celery. Once again small beads of perspiration formed quickly on my brow. For a moment I considered calling the school and telling them that all three were sick. That would solve the lunch problem, but it would also mean that the three of them would be home all day–my own private hostage situation. What to do? My coffee remained out of reach, still untouched. That explained the pending headache. Back to lunch. Cerealize it. “Everyone is buying lunch today,” I announced above the roar.

A half hour later, the din had subsided. I made a fresh cup of coffee and collected my thoughts. What had I learned from the exercise? Three things. One, some situations require leadership. Two, three children and one grownup is not time to establish a democracy. There is no Bill of Rights. To quote Mel Brooks, “It’s good to be the king.” Three, break the problem down into bite-sized pieces, don’t try to swallow the elephant whole.

That same approach works just as well with EHR grownups; clinical grownups and IT grownups. Improving the interaction takes leadership. Large, institution-changing projects involve pulling people out of their normal routines and relationships.  Solving problems will not involve a kumbaya moment–Program management is not a democracy. To succeed, the program champion, having created a vision, will have to break it down into bite-sized pieces.

saint

Who was that woman who put in our first EHR system?

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vacuum_cleaner

The first home I bought was in Denver.  Built in 1898, it lacked so many amenities that it seemed better suited as a log cabin.  There was not a single closet, perhaps because that was a time when Americans were more focused on hunting than gathering.  Compared to today’s McMansions, it was doll-house sized.

It needed work—things like electricity, water—did I mention closets?  I stripped seven costs of paint from the stairs.  Hand-built a fireplace mantel and a deck.  I arrived home to find my dog had eaten through the lathe and plaster wall of the space which served as my foyer/family room/ living room-cum-hallway.  I discovered the plaster and lathe hid a fabulous brick wall.

My choice was to patch the small hole, or remove the rest of the plaster.  Within an hour I had purchased man-tools; two mauls, chisels, and a sledge hammer.  I worked through dinner and through the night.  The only scary moment came as the steel chisel I was using connected to the wiring of two sconces which were embedded in the plaster.  On cold nights I can still feel the tingling in my left shoulder.

As the first rays of dawn carved their way through the frosted beveled glass of the front door, I wondered why I never before had noticed that the glass was frosted.  I wiped two fingers along the frost.  A fine coating of white powder came off the glass leaving two parallel tracks resembling a cross-country ski trail.  I surveyed the room only to see that the air made it look like I was standing inside of a cloud.  The fine white powder was everywhere—my Salvation Army sofa and semi-matching machine-loomed Oriental rug from the Far East (of Nebraska), a two-ton Sony television, and a component stereo system that had consumed most of much earnings.

Bachelor living can be entertaining.  One of my climbing buddies moved in with me.  The idea was I’d keep the rent low, and he’d help me by maintaining the house.  He didn’t help.  I made a list of duties; he didn’t help.  I left the vacuum in the middle of the floor, for two weeks; he didn’t help.  I made him move out, and advertised for a female roommate—an idea I now wish I’d marketed.  A girl from church came over to see the place.  I turned my back on her, only to find when I returned that she was on her hands and knees cleaning the bathroom.  I was in love.  It was like having a big sister and mother.  She even asked if it was okay if since she was doing her laundry if she did mine at the same time.  Life was oh so good.

Sometimes when one approach isn’t working it’s real easy to try something else.  And sometimes the something else gives you a solution in the form of a water-walker.  Healthcare IT and EHR aren’t ever going to be one of those sometimes.  There will be no water-walkers, no easy do-overs.  There won’t be anyone walking your hallways talking about their first wildly unsuccessful EHR implementation.  Nobody gets to wear an EHR 2.0 team hat.  Those who fail will become the detritus of holiday party conversations.  Who will be the topic of future holiday parties?  I’m just guessing, but I’m betting it will be those who failed to develop a viable Healthcare IT plan, whoever selected the EHR without developing an RFP, the persons who decided Patient Relationship Management (PRM) was a waste of money.  The good news is that with all of those people leaving your organization, it costs less to have the party.

I’d better go.  Somebody left the vacuum in the middle of the floor so I need to get cracking before my wife advertises for a female roommate.

saint

Why is change management so important?

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If  EHR is about anything it’s about change.  So much of what exists today has to do with creating and moving documents.  Did you know?

  • Of all documents handled each day in the average office,
    90% are merely shuffled
  • Currently, 90% of corporate memory exists on paper
  • There are over four trillion documents in the U.S. alone,
    growing at a rate of 22% per year
  • Professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information,
    but they spend up to 50% looking for it
  • Corporate paper-based documents are growing at the rate of
    200% per year
  • 19 copies are made from each paper document
  • 22% of all documents are lost
  • 7.5% of paper documents are lost completely
  • 3% of the remainder get misfiled
  • $20.00 is spent on labor to file a document
  • $120.00 is spent on labor searching for the misfiled paper documents
  • $250.00 is spent on labor to search for lost files

From Price Waterhouse

black saint 2

EHR-step away from the scalpel

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So, I lunched today with a friend who is an executive at a healthcare consultancy.  She recently spent four days in a hospital, entering via the trauma center.  The purists among us would think, “If she only had a personal health record (PHR).”

As it turns out, she did.  From what I understood form our chat, the people in the hospital did not welcome her understanding of healthcare.  She handed someone on the trauma team her PHR from Google Health Vault.  According to her, she had downloaded enough data on her jump drive to where MRI’s were dripping from the USB.

At some point they determined she needed to have surgery because of something that appeared on her CAT scan.  Moments before seeing how well she could count backwards from 100, she was able to convince the surgeon that she did not require an operation because what they saw was a pre-existing condition which was documented on her PHR.  Step away from the scalpels.

I think the scalpel thing only served to spur her on.  After leaving the hospital, she requested a copy of her bill—all forty-three pages.  She read it, line by line.  They hate it when patients do that.  Her insurance covered everything, so it’s not like she was minding her pennies.  She was minding her sanity.  Seven hundred and some dollars for Tylenol.  She never took any Tylenol.  Somehow the billing system was tied to the fact that Tylenol was prescribed, independent of whether she actually took it.

Seventy-nine hundred dollars for a CT-scan.  Only ten times higher than the national average.

Where were the failure points?  People.  IT.  Process.  It’s a good thing she knew what she was doing or right now she’d be missing a thing-a-ma-jig—and they would have billed her for another Tylenol to manage that pain.

Without change management and work flow improvement, EHR will only make things worse.  There is a term of art for the intersection of work flows, people, and data—it’s called a mess.  To minimize the mess, to have any shot at an ROI, the sooner you employ adults to run the Program Management Office (PMO) for your EHR, the better your chances.

sainttop5

what’s your HIT group doing for you?

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duck

I love to cook and I belong to several internet food related sites. As an aside, one of my favorites is www.chowhound.com. Maybe it’s my personality, or lack of one, but I’m not a fan of recipes, at least not the details like measuring, ingredients, cook time, and temperature. I think that this is where the fact that I function with equal vigor from both hemispheres of my brain causes conflict—probably also explains why I had such a difficult time completing my math degree. If I don’t like the details, what else is there, you may ask? It’s more than the pictures, if that was all there was I’d be satisfied just cutting pictures out of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. I like the ideas those sites generate, but I also can’t stand to be encumbered by some silly set of rules. I guess I figure that with a set of rules anyone can be successful making that particular recipe, so where’s the challenge in that.

So anyway, I decided to smoke a nice sized duck on my grill. I rinsed the bird, trussed it, pricked the skin with a fork, stuffed it with a few blood oranges, and applied my homemade rub to the skin. The apple-wood chips were smoking nicely as I placed the bird, breast-side up on the roasting rack I had placed inside the cast-iron skillet. After turning down the burners I closed the lid. The grill, I should point out, is a seven-burner, infrared, stainless steel monstrosity with which one could probably roast an entire pig or forge iron ore into ingots. Total roasting time, about two hours. I checked the thermometer on the grill’s hood; it displayed a temperature of three hundred and fifty degrees–perfect, more or less.

It turns out that it can take as long as five minutes for the grill’s thermometer to register the correct temperature. The temperature dial on this particular model redlines at seven hundred degrees, high enough to produce spontaneous combustion. After two hours at 700 degrees, interesting things begin to happen to the carcass of a duck. Upon raising the lid the entire bird looked as though it had been spray painted a matte black. The roasting rack had melted. The leg bones appeared to have been charred from the inside out—they disintegrated the moment I touched them. I felt like a helpless doctor in the ER, there was nothing I could do to save it.

Have you ever felt that way when you try to understand how any of the healthcare IT projects are progressing? How’s EHR?  What’s the impact of reform on EHR?  Why aren’t we doing more with social media?  How come we don’t have a patient relationship management (PRM) system?  According to the reports that come across your desk, everything seems to be humming along nicely. In the committee meetings, seats are filled.  The emails imply all is fine.  Looking fine and being fine are not the same.  Looks can be deceiving. Ask the duck.

By the way, the duck fat did a great job of seasoning the iron skillet, so if that ever happens to you simply explain that what you were really doing was seasoning the pan.

saint

How’s the EHR vendor performing?

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cat

Many organizations have a Program Management Office and a Program Steering Committee to oversee all aspects of the EHR.  Typically these include broad objectives like defining the functional and technical requirements, process redesign, change management, software selection, training, and implementation.  Chances are that neither the PMO or the steering committee has ever selected or implemented an EHR.  As such, it can be difficult to know how well the effort is proceeding.  Simply matching deliverables to milestones may be of little value if the deliverables and milestones are wrong.  The program can quickly take on the look and feel of the scene from the movie City Slickers when the guys on horseback are tyring to determine where they are.  One of the riders replies, “We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re making really good time.”

One way to provide oversight is to constantly ask the PMO “why.”  Why did we miss that date?  Why are we doing it this way?  Tell me again, why did we select that vendor?  Why didn’t we evaluate more options?  As members of the steering committee you are responsible for being able to provide correct answers to those questions, just as the PMO is responsible for being able to provide them to you.  The PMO will either have substantiated answers, or he or she won’t.  If the PMO isn’t forthcoming with those answers, in effect you have your answer to a more important question, “Is the project in trouble?”  If the steering committe is a rubber stamp, everyone loses.  To be of value, the committee should serve as a board of inquiry.  Use your instincts to judge how the PMO responds.  Is the PMO forthcoming?  Does the PMO have command of the material?  Can the PMO explain the status in plain English?

So, how can you tell how the EHR effort is progressing?  Perhaps this is one way to tell.

A man left his cat with his brother while he went on vacation for a week. When he came back, he called his brother to see when he could pick the cat up. The brother hesitated, then said, “I’m so sorry, but while you were away, the cat died.”

The man was very upset and yelled, “You know, you could have broken the news to me better than that. When I called today, you could have said the cat was on the roof and wouldn’t come down. Then when I called the next day, you could have said that he had fallen off and the vet was working on patching him up. Then when I called the third day, you could have said he had passed away.”

The brother thought about it and apologized.

“So how’s Mom?” asked the man.

“She’s on the roof and won’t come down.”

If you ask the PMO how the project is going and he responds by saying, “The vendor’s on the roof and won’t come down,” it may be time to get a new vendor.

black saint 2

Is EHR so distasteful that providers need incentive?

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broccoli

Of what were we last speaking?  Do you ever wonder if perhaps you are the only person who was never photographed with one of the Kennedys?  That got me thinking about our presidents.  Yesterday NPR interviewed the person who spent eighty hours interviewing Clinton during the eight years during which he was allowed to park freely anywhere in DC.  See how this is already starting to come together?

The interviewer mentioned that Clinton described the Lewinski episode as a distraction.  I also employed several descriptors of that series of affairs—of course, the pun is intentional—but I must have overlooked calling it a distraction.  People on both sides of the dialog call the episode a stupid thing.  Here’s how I look at it—doing long division and forgetting to carry the one is ‘a stupid thing’; mixing a red sock with a load of whites is ‘a stupid thing’.  Sometimes politics can have us all screaming infidelities.

When I share my thoughts about these things, some look at me like they are staring at an unlabeled can of food.  I guess objectivity is only for the truly unimaginative.

So all of that thinking about presidents got me to thinking about Mr. Obama, reform, and EHR.  Remember that a lot of the original economic reform discussion had to do with TARP monies being almost tossed at the banks.  It was almost like a reverse bank holdup, making the banks take money.

Which now takes us to healthcare reform and EHR.  ARRA money and states like New York providing a stimulus to the stimulus.  What would make governments offer money for EHR?  How might we illustrate this?

Let’s say I offer my children a choice of two things to eat; broccoli and chocolate cake.  They make a bee-line for the cake.  The broccoli requires an incentive to get any takers.  I ask a few questions—they are prepared to suffer untold penalties instead of eating the broccoli.  There may be some financial incentive which will entice them to eat broccoli, but it will be pricey.  Telling them it’s good for them, or that they have to eat it makes no difference to short people—they want to be bribed.

Telling healthcare providers EHR is good for them, or that they have to do it makes no difference to tall people—they want to be bribed.  What does this signify?  What is it about EHR that requires incentives and some foreign force majeure to get the discussion underway?  It’s not as though the healthcare providers don’t want to do things that will improve their business.  What is it they know that we don’t?  What would make them run towards EHR rather than away from it?

You don’t suppose it has something to do with broccoli, do you?

For those who enjoy Dana Carvey, here’s a link to his song about chopping broccoli.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO57XRDDodk

saint

EHR: add three cups of technology and stir

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cast

According to my neighbor, who is a woman, next week is the season premier for “Desperate Hot-wives”—her words, not mine. My wife refers to my little brain hiccups as Roemer-minutes, a little hitch in my git-along where the thinking part of my brain briefly vacations in the fifth dimension. Speaking of the fifth dimension, the dimension, not the sixties rock group, I was reading up on it the other day. There’s this professor of theoretical physics from Harvard, Lisa Randall, who happens to look a little like Marcia Cross who portrays Bree Van De kamp—actually she looks more like Jodi Foster. See how quickly this all ties together? Anyway, Dr. Randall has developed a theory about how the universe is warped—something many of us expected. According to her model, the reason gravity appears so weak is that the universe is actually warped by a hidden fifth dimension—must be why we haven’t seen it, because it’s hidden—and our gravity is just the leftovers from the dark side.

For the inherently curious, in mathematical terms her equation is, ds2=dr2+e-kr(dxm dxn hmn). That was helpful, wasn’t it? Here’s where it gets complicated. People in Europe will are testing the Large Hadron Collider to look for gravitons, theoretical particles of gravity. The collider smashes protons into one another, and if these theoretical particles appear then disappear that somehow proves the theory. However, and depending whether you’re a glass half-full or a glass half-empty kind of person, this is a rather big however, we could all die. This is where the distinctions between the meanings of the words possible and probable become rather important.


According to this whole other branch of physics, something quite unpleasant could happen, the creation of doomsday phenomena, including microscopic black holes that would grow instantaneously and swallow the earth, and strangelets that could transform the earth into a dead dense lump. Could it happen? Yes. Will it? Probably not. So there you have it.

Where does that leave us? Assuming that it does, leave us, that is, alive, it makes the notion of implementing EHR seem just a tad more simplistic. At least we won’t be creating any black holes. So, set your phasers for stun and let us begin again. To implement EHR in your organization you need a champion, a sponsor. Someone who isn’t afraid to say, ‘follow me’. As we said before, this type of project does not lend well to the notion of ‘add three cups of technology and stir’. The champion is needed not so much for figuring out the shape of things to come, but for their ability to cause those things to be implemented within the organization. This person should have ready access to resources, dollars, and the ear of someone very senior in your firm. Next time we’ll begin to take a look at the champion’s role.

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Hospital Impact – Healthy Choices: Nine Healthcare Bloggers Worth a Click

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Hospital Impact – Healthy Choices: Nine Healthcare Bloggers Worth a Click http://bit.ly/5KUlg

saint

EHR: What questions remain unanswered?

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red stapler

“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 Friday.

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 EHR and ask myself three questions:

1. Why do people really believe the existing national roll out plan will work?

2. How did the plan ever get so complex?

3. How much money will be wasted before people look for a realistic solution?

What do you think?

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