hospitals

How can you solve the EHR puzzle?

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Seth Godin wrote about the “Perfect Problem.”

A perfect problem, in its existing state, is unsolvable.  The way most of us handle it is to click our heels together three times and hope it goes away.  We tend to work on imperfect problems, those that can be solved.

What is the difference between the two?  The first step is the ability to understand what makes the perfect problem uniquely unfixable.  Perhaps a few examples would help.

  • The CEO imposed a deadline for the implementation of EHR.
  • CMS Meaningful Use rules do not fit with our operational strategy.
  • If we do not implement EHR by this date, we do not get the money.
  • We must meet Meaningful Use
  • We do not have enough resources from the EHR users to understand their processes.
  • We cannot continue to support these low-margin services
  • We do not have enough time to define our requirements
  • We cannot afford to spend the time required to assess our processes before we bring in the EHR vendor.

What can be done?  The easy answer is to plan for failure and do your best to minimize it.

What is another way to describe the above examples?  They are constraints.  They can all be rewritten using the word “can’t”.  Rewritten, we might say, “We had a chance to succeed, but because of X, Y, and Z we can’t.”  If that assessment is correct, you will fail, or at least under-deliver at a level that will be remembered for years to come.  That’s a legacy none of us wants.

There are a few solutions to this scenario.  You can eliminate the seemingly intractable constraints; the organization can determine to re-implement EHR and hope for different results; or they can simply find someone else to solve the perfect problem.

Experience teaches good leaders really want reasoned advice.  They want the members of the C-suite to tell them what must be done to be successful.  Good leaders do not accept “can’t”—not on the receiving end, not on the delivering end.

Some will argue, “This is the way our organization works.”  Even if that is true one must consider what is needed to make an exception to the constraint.  Would you accept this logic from a subordinate?  Of course not.  You’d demand a viable solution.  If you are being constrained in your efforts to solve a perfect problem, perhaps it is time to restate the constraints.

One of my college professors—way back when we still had inkwells on our desks—told me that if you cannot solve the problem the way it is stated, it is to your advantage to restate the problem.  Maybe the solution to the perfect problem is to restate it in a manner that makes it imperfect—solvable.

saintPaul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

“How many days ago was Sunday?”

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The photo comes from my Robert Redford look alike period.

Do you ever awaken wishing you were all you used to think you were before you figured out you weren’t?  Me either.  I’m someone who has these kind of days when it’s best to keep me away from shiny objects.

During college, I spent several summers volunteering for a group called Young Life at their camps throughout the US.  Silver Cliff was one of their camps in the mountains of Colorado.  Each week we’d take in a few hundred high school kids from throughout the US, and give them the opportunity to do things and challenge themselves in new ways; everything from riding horses to rappelling.

The prior summer I was the head wrangler at one of their camps—I had never ridden a horse prior to being placed in charge of the riding program.  This summer is was the person running the rappelling program.  Needless to say, I had never done that before either.

We received a day’s worth of instruction before we were turned loose on the kids.  One of the first things we had to learn was that the ropes and harness, if properly secured to the carabineers and figure eight, would actually keep you from falling to your death.  The first test was jumping from a platform way up in a tree while on belay.  After a few moments of white-knuckle panic, I stepped over the edge and was belayed safely to the ground.

From there, we scouted a place for the rappel, and found two suitable cliffs, each with about a hundred foot vertical drop.  Watching my first rappel must have reminded others of what it would have been like watching a chimp learn how to use tools for the first time.  After several tentative descents, I was able to make it safely to the bottom in a single jump.

Each day we’d run a few dozen kids through the course, ninety-nine percent of whom had never rappelled, or ever wanted to rappel.  To convince them that it was safe and that they could complete it, I would instruct them in the technique as I hung backwards over the chalk face of the limestone cliff.

Each day we’d have one or two kids who wanted nothing to do with my little course.  Occasionally, while on belay, one of them would freeze half way down the cliff, and I’d have to belay down and rescue them.

Once or twice I’d have an attractive female counselor on belay, her knowing that I was the only thing keeping her from being a Rorschach stain on the rocks below.  Scared, and looking for a boost of confidence, “She’d ask, how long have you been doing this?” I’d look at my watch and ask her how many days ago was Sunday.  I viewed it as an opportunity to have a little fun with her—sort of like turning to your friend in the checkout line in 7-eleven and saying loud enough for others to hear, “I thought we agreed we weren’t going to use our guns.” I also hoped maybe even having to go on a heroic rescue.

How long have you been doing this?  That’s seems like a fair question to ask of anyone in a clinical situation.  It’s more easily answered when you are in someone’s office and are facing multiple framed and matted attestations of their skills.  Seen any good EHR or HIT certificates on the walls of the people entrusted with the execution of the EHR endowment?  Me either.  I have a cardiologist and he has all sorts of paper hanging from his wall.  Helps to convince me he knows his stuff.  Now, if I were to pretend to be a cardiologist—I’ve been thinking of going to night school—I’d expect people would expect to see my bona fides.

Shouldn’t the same logic apply to spending millions of EHR dollars?  Imagine this discussion.

“What do you do?”

“I’m buying something for the hospital I’ve never bought.”

“Why?”

“The feds say we’ve got to have it.”

“Oh.  What’s it do?”

“Nobody really knows.”

“How long have you been doing this?”

“How many days ago was Sunday?”

“What’s it cost?”

“Somewhere between this much,” he stretches out his arms, “And this much,” stretching them further.

“Do the doctors want this?”

“Some do.  A lot don’t.”

“How will you know when you’re done if you got it right?”

“Beats me.”

“Sounds like fun,” she said, trying to fetter a laugh.

Sounds like fun to me too.

saintPaul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

Why do you think projects fail?

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Again on the project failure?  Yes.  Why?  Trying to head it off at the pass.  Source, The Bull Report.

Failure_Cause_Survey.264

Fifty-seven percent of failures are due to bad communication.  What’s that?  Poor grammar?  No.  Not enough meetings?  Doubtful.

It’s about PMO.  A hired gun?  Perhaps.  An advocate who will manage the vendor on your behalf.  What’s the rest of the hired gun’s job description?  All the blue stuff in the graph..

The good news is that being a bad dresser will not hurt the project.

saint Paul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

My profiles: LinkedInWordPressTwitterMeetupBlog RSS
Contact me: Google Talk/paulroemer Skype/paulroemer Google Wave/paulroemer

The most relevant EHR/EMR piece you will ever read

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According to the New England Journal of Medicine, somewhere north of fifty percent of EHR implementations fails.  Your odds of success are no greater than the flip of a coin.

What if there is a tool whose use can stop the failure of most EMR system implementations?  The purpose of this post is to let you know that there is a definitive solution to help small providers, clinics, IPAs, and hospitals.

What tasks of the EMR process is the primary cause for failure?  They are the tasks that are under budgeted, neglected, haphazardly addressed, or addressed by people who have no earthly idea how to perform them.

They are the same tasks that cause systems projects in other industries to fail.  If you do these tasks wrong, nothing else you do will make any difference—do-overs cost twice as much as your first failure.

The laundry list of those tasks is:

  • Defining your requirements—for physicians, nurses, staff—all of them.
  • Putting those requirements into an operable framework.
  • Ranking the requirements in a way to enable you to pick a good solution.
    • Technology Evaluation
    • Clinical Workflow Evaluation – Analysis of current clinical workflows.
    • Gap Analysis – Comparing current technical capabilities to desired capabilities.
    • EMR/Practice Management needs evaluation
    • ARRA Incentive Estimation
    • Qualified EMR vendor list
    • Vendor competitive bid assessment
    • Hardware requirements

I recently asked a hospital CEO, “What would you have done differently regarding your EHR selection?”

Here is a paraphrase of his response.

  • Invested much more time in understanding what system we should select and how we would use it.
  • My peers assumed someone else had already done all the up-front stuff (see the above list), and they selected their system solely on what others were using.  Alternatively, they picked a system based on a golf course conversation or something they saw at a trade show.

How many of your business and clinical requirements do you need to meet for your EHR selection to have any chance of succeeding?  The best answer is “All of them”.  How many requirements are needed to define your needs; one hundred, two hundred?  Not even close.

Try this exercise.  Search Google for “CRM RFP” or “ERP RFP”.  There are hundreds of useful responses.  Now search Google for “EHR RFP” or “EMR RFP”.  There are no useful responses.  (If you cannot find something on Google, it often means it does not exist.)  The healthcare industry is usually very good at sharing useful information.

I’ve been coaching executives for thirty years about how to get these tasks right.  In doing so, I developed something that made the software selection task winnable.  (This piece is not a Tony Robbins narrative, it is not about me; I am not selling anything.)

Here is what I did.  I built a Request for Proposal (RFP) for CRM and ERP.  I started with 1,000 requirements for each.  I license it to clients and work with them to edit it, to add new requirements, to delete requirements that did not apply to their organization.  They would use the result to select the application best suited to their firm.

This process never failed to benefit my clients.  I would take whatever new requirements they created and add them to my RFP.  My RFP became more robust.  Each time the RFP was issued I collected the responses from each of the vendors and built a database of what their applications could deliver.  I now have a few thousand functional and technical requirements, and up to date responses on what the applications vendors could deliver.

Why did I build this RFP?  The answer is simple.  I needed to create a reason for a firm to hire my firm instead of hiring one of the name-brand multi-national consulting firms.  The RFP served as a cost differentiator.  Instead of spending a million dollars to hire a name-brand firm to develop something from scratch, they could be months ahead, and at a lower cost by using a proven tool.

Therefore, here’s my point.  There is a firm that built a tool similar to mine, a tool to add to the probability of you selecting the best EMR/EHR for your firm.  It will not guarantee your success, but it will significantly reduce the chances of failure.

Clearly, even if you select the right system there are still many opportunities to fail.  The converse is that if you select the wrong EHR, it will fail.  That statement is not an opinion; it is a fact.

I’ve arranged a Go-to-meeting conference call with the CEO of that firm for the week of July 26.  This organization has built what I described; an RFP with more than a thousand unique requirements, an automated way to analyze the vendor responses, and a way to match your prioritized requirements to a short list of EHR vendors.  It will not be a sales pitch.  It is designed to be a question and answer session.  Who should participate?

  • Smaller providers whose only other option is to hire the person who set up their web site to manage their EMR selection
  • IPAs whose members are looking for advice about selecting a system to meet their specialization
  • Hospitals struggling with finding a defensible position for their selection.

If you are involved in the selection of an EMR/EHR, you should find an hour to assess the tool.  If you do not have the resources to make use of the tool, they do.  They can help you help yourselves.  I promise you, this will be the best use of sixty minutes you have had in a long time.  If you know someone who might benefit from this session, please forward this and have them contact me.  If you could benefit, simply respond to me.

saintPaul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

EHR 2 a-days

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It’s hot and muggy; a hazy pall seems to levitate before me.  We call it Pennsylvania in summer.  Chest pain yesterday, nitro in gym bag.  Intervals today.  I hate running intervals as much now as I did in high school, but they’re better for the heart than just running distance.  Twenty-four 110’s.  Did I mention it was hot?

I am on the high school track.  The football team is/are—where are all the English majors when you need them—going through their drills.  Running and thinking.  That’s a good combination for me.  After two laps I’m glistening, after three I’m soaked through.  That’s when it hits me.

Practice.  Offensive and defensive drills.  Blocking and tackling.  Run the option.  Block the punt.  Come back tomorrow and do it again.  Do it until you get it right.  Do it until you can get it right in the game.  Pretty neat idea all this practicing.

Know where this is headed?  See, that wasn’t too difficult—remember, the desk is hard, the task is difficult. (My one takeaway from eighth grade English.)  Who doesn’t get to practice, doesn’t even have a coach?  Bingo, the EHR Project Management Executive.  It would be better if they did.  Imagine this conversation:

“Sorry Charlie, hit the showers.”

“Why Coach?”

“Your change management isn’t working for you today.  You’re leaving processes untouched.”

“It was the docs’ fault.  They just toy with me.  Treat me like a wonk and tell IT jokes behind my back.”

“Your game plan is coming apart.”

“But I didn’t get to practice, we didn’t even get to warm up.  I’ll do better next time.”

“Which next time is that Charlie?  With whose money?  These are The Bigs, Charlie.  Only grownups play here.  I’m afraid I’m going to have to send you back down to Single A.”

“Private practice.?”

“Sorry Charlie”—sounds like the tuna commercial.

You’ve got one shot at this, no warmups, no practices; there are no do-overs, and you are gambling millions.  DIRT-FIT  Do It Right The FIrst Time

saintPaul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

Where workflow goes to die

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There are two types of business processes; easily repeatable processes (ERP), and Barely repeatable processes.   Most of the real work that needs to be done in EHR workflow improvement happens in the blank white space between the boxes on the org chart.  That’s where you’ll find a lot of the BRPs–Barely Repeatable Processes.

It is easy to automate the ERPs, and nearly impossible to automate the BRPs.  If you can’t reform either set of processes with your EHR all you have implemented is a very expensive chart scanner.

saint Paul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

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EHR’s Gordian Knot

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There were four of us, each wearing dark suits and sunglasses, uniformly walking down the street, pausing at a cross-walk labeled “consultants only”—I think it’s a trick because a lot of drivers seem to speed up when they see us. We looked like a bad outtake from the movie Reservoir Dogs. We look like that a lot.

Why do you consult, some ask? It beats sitting home listening to Michael Bolton or practicing my moves for, So You Think You Can Dance, I tell them.

Listening to the BBC World News on NPR whilst driving, there’s one thing I always come away with—they’re always so…so British. No matter the subject—war or recession—I feel like I should be having a proper pot of tea and little cucumber sandwiches with the crusts removed; no small feat while navigating the road.

Today’s conversation included a little homily about the Gordian knot with which the company Timberland is wrestling, questioning whether as a company Timberland should do well, or do good. (Alexander the Great attempted to untie such a knot, and discovered it had no end (sort of like a Möbius strip, a one-sided piece of paper–pictured above. (For the truly obtuse, among which I count myself, the piece of paper can be given a half twist in two directions; clockwise and counter-clockwise, thereby giving it handedness, making it chiral—when the narrative gets goofy enough, sooner or later the Word dictionary surrenders as it did with chiral.))) I’m done speaking in parentheses.

Should they do well or good? Knowing what little command some people have of the English language, those listeners must have wondered, why ask a redundant question. Why indeed? That’s why I love the English, no matter the circumstances they, they refuse to stoop to speaking American.

Back to Gordo and his knot. That was the point of the knot. One could not have both—sorry for the homonym. Alexander knew that since the knot had no end, the only way to untie it was to cut it. The Gordian knot is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem, and the solution is called the “Alexandrian solution”.

To the question; Well or good. Good or evil. Are the two choices mutually exclusive? For an EHR? They need not be. The question raised by the BBC was revenue-focused (doing well) versus community or green-focused (doing good). My question to the reader is what happens if we view EHR with this issue as an implication, a la p→q.Let’s review a truth table:

if P equals if Q equals p→q is
define requirements increase revenues TRUE
play vendor darts increase revenues FALSE
ignore change management increase revenues FALSE
no connectivuty increase revenues FALSE
new EHR software increase revenues FALSE
change processes increase revenues TRUE
eliminate waste increase revenues TRUE
decrease redundancy increase revenues TRUE
Strong PMO increase revenues TRUE

From a healthcare provider’s perspective the answers can be surprising; EHR can be well and good, or not well and not good.  The Alexandrian solution for EHR is a Alexandrian PMO.

Have your people call my people–we’ll do lunch.

saint Paul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

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Is the C-suite fiddling while EHR burns?

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There is an adage in the military—different spanks for different ranks.  If speaks to a double standard, the less egregious their punishment for similar offenses, similar misjudgments.

We see that every day in business, and we see it a lot in healthcare, especially in hospitals.  Physicians are held accountable for medical errors.  Hospitals pay millions for malpractice insurance knowing that mistakes will be made and people will be held accountable for their mistakes.

But what about on the business side?  Who is held accountable for business mistakes?  An acquisition that failed to deliver.  An expensive new service offering that bled the company dry.  A decline in the number of patients. The failure of a major IT initiative to deliver results.

Take EHR.  Some of you are saying, “Yes, please take it.”

  • Around sixty percent of the large EHR projects have failed in one respect or another
  • Most will not receive ARRA incentives
  • A large number of hospitals are on their second implementation of EHR
  • Some have productivity losses of thirty percent

Who is going to be fired for the two hundred dollar misstep?  The board?  Never.  The CEO—no.  The COO or CFO?  Unlikely.  The CIO?  That is the safe bet.

Did the CIO authorize the expenditure?  Nope.  Did the CIO get all the dollars needed to be successful, all the user support?  Unlikely.

In most cases the CIO has all of the responsibility and only some of the authority.  There are a handful of people in each organization tasked with the oversight of the large project.  They are the ones who should be asking the right questions, the ones who should be demanding answers.

A failed project, a failed strategy should not come as a surprise.  The only people who will be wearing EHR 2.0 T-shirts are those who authorized EHR 1.0.  How come these individuals are not accountable?

saint Paul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

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What benefit is there to meeting Meaningful Use?

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Commercials bug me.  Big surprise.

You have probably seen the commercial for the Sleep Number Bed.  A bare mattress, a glass of wine on the mattress, a bowling ball is dropped on the mattress.  The glass of wine does not spill.  That makes some people rush out and buy the mattress.  Why?  For the security in knowing that just in case they leave a glass of wine on their mattress and then happen to drop a bowling ball on it, the wine will not spill.

That dog don’t hunt unless you happen to be opening a bowling alley/Motel 6.  The company is trying to entice you on the merits of doing something by asking you to make the leap of faith by equating the bowling ball falling on the bed to having your spouse get in or out of the bed without disturbing your sleep.

A feint.  A maneuver designed to distract or mislead you from the real purpose.  Meaningful Use.  Certification.  A feint.  Designed to distract or mislead you from the reason you need an EHR.  The terms of Meaningful Use, that is, what is meaningful to your organization should be set by your organization, not some national standard applicable to every hospital in the country.  Hospitals are not ubiquitous—the Meaningful Use standards are.  How can a single set of standards be in line with what you require?

What’s the feint?  Certification, cash incentives, Regional Extension Centers.  A full court press trying to get hospitals to do what the feds want it to do in order to meet their goal of a nationwide interconnected healthcare system.

What proof, other than a check, has anyone offered that you benefit from meeting Meaningful Use?

Should you try to meet Meaningful Use?  I think not.  There is no ROI, and the full set of standards have yet to be published.  What should you do?  Have a glass of wine, or better yet—go bowling.  Don’t forget to buy one of those snazzy bowling shirts.

saint Paul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

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Are hospitals making the the same mistake as BP?

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“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings—…

A lot of the strategic issues in healthcare are not easily explained.  One issue can be explained to a fifth-grader.  So, get your crayons out and follow along.

Fifty-some days and counting.  Say it with me—BP.  In many respects healthcare’s approach to social media is analogous to BP’s—the major difference is that neither the payors, pharma, nor the providers has yet to wipe out an entire geography—but the week is not over yet.

BP is offering an MBA in how not to use social media.  Nobody is queuing up on Amazon to buy the book, “BP’s ten pointers on crisis management.”

The funny thing about disasters is being able to schedule them in Outlook.  There are no pop-ups fifteen minutes before the big bang reminding you to get ready—“pipeline blows up in 15 minutes.”

We both know, sooner or later you will have one.  While yours may not crater the shrimping industry, it may be enough to do some serious damage to your business.  Most hospitals have a risk management group.  BP has one.  The mission statement of risk management is to assess and mitigate risks.

BP’s group probably had a plan in place to address a number of risks—risks like OPEC, an expansive war in the middle east, a tanker collision.  Apparently, they overlooked the risk of having a blowout a mile under the ocean.  Who’da thunk it?

If you Google “oil spill” there are fifty million hits.  Add “BP” to the search and the results narrow to a mere forty million.  That toothpaste is never going back in the tube.  People who can’t find the Gulf of Mexico on a map know that BP ruined it.  Thirty years from now people will still know the name of the firm that poisoned the Gulf, destroyed businesses, ruined vacations, made people sick, and cratered home sales along hundreds of miles of shoreline.

No matter what type of disaster BP could have faced, they demonstrated they were not prepared.  Even if it is proven that the disaster was not BP’s fault, it is too late to change their ownership of it.  Nobody is ever going to delete those forty million Google pieces linking BP to failure.  If BP hired a thousand workers whose only job was to try to counter each piece of negative media it would take them decades.

What is the one word to describe BP’s social media strategy?  LATE.

There is no useful social media strategy worth anything that begins after a disaster, none worth anything that begins after a misstep, after a faux pas.  Dictionary.com defines a faux pas as a social error—a boo-boo.

Unlike Meaningful Use, a good social media strategy can have an almost infinite ROI.  A good social media strategy, in addition to adding revenues and capturing patients, can help assuage the bleeding.  A good social media strategy played out in advance creates allies.

Let us look at this from the perspective of large healthcare providers.  What types of unfavorable events could negatively affect a hospital?

  • A medical disaster
  • Fraud
  • Medical errors
  • Reform
  • Scandal
  • Medical malpractice
  • Natural disasters
  • A data breech

While all negative events are not the same, many aspects of a good social media strategy apply regardless of the type of problem.

There are two major components of a good healthcare social media strategy:

  1. It should be pro-active.  Your social media strategy should be building goodwill each day.  Google the name of your hospital and see how many hits you get.  Next, see how many thousands of those hits are attributable to people outside your organization—too many to count.  You are already late.  People are already posting videos and writing about you.
  2. It should be reactive.  Make sure your “What are we going to do now?” account has a positive balance.  At the very least make sure you can push a button and unleash a plague of social media “I feel your pain” initiatives.

I’d wager a hospital could develop an outstanding social media strategy for less than one-tenth of what it pays in legal fees.

saint Paul M. Roemer
Chief Imaginist, Healthcare IT Strategy

1475 Luna Drive, Downingtown, PA 19335
+1 (484) 885-6942
paulroemer@healthcareitstrategy.com

My profiles: LinkedInWordPressTwitterMeetupBlog RSS
Contact me: Google Talk/paulroemer Skype/paulroemer Google Wave/paulroemer