Short Link: http://j.mp/6JDKAV
Gosh! (Fake humility intended.)
I was having writer’s block problem. It’s not that I don’t have enough ideas, but rather that I have too many. They jostle and shout “Me!” “Me!” “Me!” and sometimes I don’t have a good way to prioritize. (Maybe I need something like the EncounterPRO Pediatric EMR Workflow System’s big picture “radar view”—AKA Office View—which helps prioritize pending tasks.)
Then this came in over the transom. Last year my white paper on “EMR Workflow, Usability, and Productivity in Pediatric and Primary Care” was the most downloaded article on Healthcare Technology Online.
Since old news is no news (this was announced on December 22nd, but I was on beach holiday and did not notice, was I too busy tweeting? Perhaps I should have been following on Twitter?) my decision about what to write about was effectively made. However, folks wouldn’t have been paying attention back then anyway. Now that folks are reattaching the Web to their brains, maybe it’s for the best.
The article on Healthcare Technology Online republished my blog post “A White Paper About EMR Workflow, Usability, and Productivity in Pediatric and Primary Care” about the longer (and more technical) white paper “Pediatric and Primary Care EMR Business Process Management: A Look Back, a Look Under the Hood, and a Look Forward.” That white paper was in turn an update to my 2003 white paper “Electronic Medical Record Workflow Management: The Workflow of Workflow” By the way, please see instructions at “Could You Do Me a Favor? “Electronic Medical Record Workflow Management: The Workflow of Workflow” so I can keep that at the top of Google for the search terms “EMR” plus “workflow” ( )
Thank You!
First and foremost I’d like to thank all the little people who made this possible—the children whose pediatricians use our product, the High-Usability EncounterPRO Pediatric EMR Workflow System.
Second, thank you Ken Congdon, chief editor at Healthcare Technology Online, for republishing the white paper at just the moment that a giant light bulb turned on over the collective heads of the healthcare information technology industry.
But most of all I’d like to thank family physician Geoffrey Wittig, M.D. He wrote the letter to the editor at the New York Times, about the impact of traditional EMRs on the high-volume, low-margin business of primary care, which caused me to update the original EMR workflow white paper.
“A high-volume, low-margin business like primary care medicine simply cannot support the costs. These include both the very high dollar cost of buying and maintaining a system and the huge drop in productivity that initially accompanies implementation.”
May your common sense rule the day.
P.S. “Me!”, “Me!”, “Me!”