Professionally speaking, I am a connoisseur of a certain kind of crankiness.
I like to listen to people who don't like the deal we've been handed and are willing to grump about it.
Decorum may make the world turn smoothly, but noisy people make it change. Often, they also make my job more fun.
A lot of people in leadership pay lip service to the ideal that they're open to new ideas, but we all know from experience that many are not.
In the magazine this week are short profiles on four of the squeakiest wheels in healthcare information technology—three physicians and a researcher with a doctorate in sociology. They are Dr. Lawrence Weed, Dr. Scot Silverstein, Dr. Deborah Peel, and Ross Koppel, Ph.D.
Each are self-professed fans of health information technology, but each have bones to pick with current systems and practices.
Read more »
Permalink | Post a Comment
How long did it take American farmers to widely adopt hybrid corn?
Honestly, I don't know, but I do remember what I was told about that kind of adoption—30 years.
I was age 22 at the time and had just started my agriculture extension training with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, where we learned the basics of rice paddy construction and swamp rice cultivation. It wasn't until later, when we were posted to our villages to serve our two-year hitches, that we learned just how hard it was going to be to convince wary farmers to abandon their familiar but ecologically destructive slash-and-burn cultivation techniques.
Read more »
Permalink | Post a Comment
Veteran informaticist Dr. Scott Weingarten took to the podium right after breakfast to announce that the healthcare reform had been upheld.
The Supreme Court decision had hit the media maybe an hour earlier that morning, so it was not breaking news, even in California, where the Zynx Health co-founder and CEO and former director of health services research at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, was the day's first speaker at the 21st annual Physician-Computer Connection Symposium, hosted by the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems in Ojai, Calif.
Read more »
Permalink | Post a Comment
The year the dot-com bubble burst, 2001, the three largest pharmacy benefit management companies launched RxHub, an electronic prescribing network, and the two main pharmacy associations created its rival, Surescripts.
While the two exchanges battled for supremacy, both promoted the common cause, e-prescribing, as a patient-safety issue and funded a grind-it-out marketing campaign that cost millions of dollars to sustain.
I had lunch the other day with physician information technology leader Dr. Harry Greenspun, who recalled those days, saying, for years "you couldn't swing a dead cat" in health IT circles without hitting Kevin Hutchinson, Surescripts' then-omnipresent CEO.
Read more »
Permalink | Post a Comment
