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January 27, 2010 -- Hospital Impact has been ranked one of the top 50 healthcare blogs by Wikio.
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Process improvement experts use root-cause analysis (RCA) to evaluate and identify the reason for the cause of a defect in an effort to isolate the one major area adversely impacting and contributing to a defect and the defect's recurrence.
Identifying the root cause of a chronic illness is one critical process improvement that will positively impact the lives and health of both individuals and communities (and bend the healthcare cost curve down).
by Gwen Darling
Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services announced awards totaling $84 million to help universities and junior colleges train and develop more than 50,000 new health IT professionals. The program targets six key health IT roles:
* Clinicians/Public health leaders
* HIM specialists
* Health information privacy and security specialists
* Research and development scientists
* Programmers and software engineers
* Health IT sub-specialists
I was wrong. I wrote that Scott Brown's victory in the Senate election in Massachusetts meant that we needed to pursue other areas of healthcare reform while Congress was embroiled in partisan gridlock. I did not expect passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (HR 3590) and Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act (HR 4872), but admit that their passage just before the Annual Congress of the American College of Healthcare Executives made for exciting discussions. Participants felt like we were part of the present.
by Paul Roemer
Now that spring is in full bloom, I've been doing a little gardening. My dogs are the anti-gardeners. No sooner do I turn my back after planting something, there they are, happily digging away and ceremoniously digging it up. I don't know if that's because they don't like the particular plant, or just happen to disagree with where I planted it.
Today I discovered the youngest dog uprooted a plant and replaced it with a Reece's Peanut Butter Cup. Perhaps she wanted to grow a candy tree.
One thing that always confuses me about gardening is this: When I plant a one-gallon shrub, I dig a two-gallon hole. I place the gallon shrub in the two-gallon hole and proceed to fill the remaining one gallon hole with the two gallons of dirt lying next to it. Without fail, there is never enough dirt to fill the hole. Perhaps you can tell me what I am doing wrong.
Here is another area of confusion for me: When you walk or are wheeled into a hospital, neither you nor anyone else knows the answer to anything.
by Jenn Riggle
Social media is all the rage with hospitals and healthcare systems. Everyone from the Mayo Clinic to Providence Alaska Medical Center have embraced blogging, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even LinkedIn, with great success. At last count, some 600 hospitals are actively using social media to connect with patients and create a dialogue with their surrounding communities.
But before you jump on the social media bandwagon, it's wise to take a step back to assess whether your organization is ready. Keep in mind: The call to action for social media typically is to drive people to your website for more information. That's why, now more than ever, a hospital's first interaction with patients is through its website. And as you know, first impressions can make or break a relationship.
Often we hear that collaboration and collaborative leadership is crucial to bringing adaptive change to our profoundly broken health care system.
And yet, to truly be successful in improving our health care system, a health care organization must first create a foundation for such change.
When each voice is heard and accountability is shared, the Mission, Vision, Values and Guiding Principles of a successful health care organization are not only words on paper, but principals that are lived and honored.
by Wendy Johnson
Dr. Larry Nathanson loves his iPad, even if patients and other staff do stop to fawn over it from time to time. The Boston-based ER physician took a break from his duties as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's Emergency Medicine Informatics honcho to blog about his iPad use in the ER.
So far, so good.
The device interfaces well with the hospital's clinical applications, and Nathanson loves how great EKGs look on the device's screen. "The only problem was that the increase in efficiency was offset by the patients and family who wanted to gawk at it."
Anyone who has ever handled an iPhone, or an iPad, however, knows how slippery the sleek devices are. "I am a little concerned about how well it will hold up in a clinical environment," Nathanson writes, "particularly the abuse it will get in the ER." You can read his full commentary on the blog Life as a Healthcare CIO.
Sometimes what is not heard is even more important than what is heard. This is especially true in the case of reforming healthcare, from the most basic of levels all the way to a national overhaul.
For example, a short time ago, while waiting in line to listen to President Obama discuss health reform, I overheard someone talking about the nation's broken healthcare system.
Question: Should we be spending our health care dollar on what is typically considered innovative and sexy and fundable--essentially, on more technology? Or would we be better off focusing more of our attention on lifestyle, nutrition and exercise, creating models that allow for relationship and trust between a patient and physician to be developed, in turn creating a system that promotes ample time for engagement and true learning to occur specific to lifestyle changes, improving nutrition and exercising appropriately?
So I was thinking about health care reform. I have avoided writing about it somewhat because I view it less as reform and more as providing insurance to the uninsured. That said, CEOs should consider the following while thinking about how their organizations and how their marketing may need to change:
Read more!