Health Care Education: What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?

Sometimes life, especially work life, becomes very routine and even monotonous. Many believe the most frustrating thing about life is not knowing what's going to happen next. But, imagine if we knew everything that would happen during our lives. Could the thought of such an existence be more horrible -- knowing exactly what's going to happen next?

Personally, I shudder to think what a world would be like if I awake every morning to Sonny and Cher singing "I Got You, Babe.”

It is up to each of us to break the routine. We want to search for the parts of our professional lives where we see the glass half full. Where we can make a difference and yes… where what we do matters.

I’d like to suggest that professional development is the way to start a “glass half full” attitude.

Education leads to knowledge.

Knowledge leads to confidence.

Confidence brings results.

Results brings self contentment.

Winter brings Spring…every year!  

Nothing makes a seemingly routine day more interesting than learning something new – challenging yourself to make a change for a better outcome in your own job. Education is never a waste of time. Participating in an educational event may not change the weather for a year, initiate fireworks at 7:30 a.m., or be held on its own private knob, but you will always take away something – even if it is a tidbit as small as a whistle pig.

Another way to break up the monotony is to not be afraid of your own shadow and instead challenge yourself to develop and present an education program of your own so others may learn from you. As part of your unit/office/department in-service schedule, ask your supervisor if you could prepare and present a 15-30 minutes education session. You have an idea, a process and valuable knowledge worth sharing. Do it! Put on your top hat and black tux and state your case. Education is the “what if?" and then "what next?" of never being stuck in one place. Yes, I know, many of you put public speaking above death on your fear list… but imagine the afterglow of conquering that fear? No more shadow of doubt.  Believe me, your colleagues will be supportive.  Confidence… because everything you do matters! 

When professional development, knowledge sharing and lifelong learning are part of your life, I predict just like Phil, “prognosticator of prognosticators,” that you’ll enjoy an early spring and your days will never be the same over and over and over again.

Think Spring! 

 

 

I welcome your responses, comments and any questions or requests for additional information on the educational activities we present at Inquisit. 

Register with www.inquisit.org and be the first to correctly guess this movie reference to be rewarded with Inquisit IQCards for free education.

Health Care Transformation: You Can’t Handle the Truth

I have been very lucky in my career to cross paths with many dedicated and innovative professionals. In this blog, I would like to introduce you to one such individual – Dr. Suzanne Paone, MBA, DHA Director, UPMC Information Services Division.  Dr. Paone and I are presenting a workshop at the 2013 ACHE Congress in March 2013. As we prepared for our workshop, I got to know Dr. Paone and just knew that she would be an excellent contributor to DeeMystify. So, I asked her nicely and she wrote for us the following excellent truths about the current transformation of the health care industry.

What follows is Dr. Paone’s Code Red contribution to DeeMystify:

It is clear to me that we need a few good leaders to handle the truths about health care.  The industry is in a state of imminent transformation.  Can you handle the truth?

What are these truths and do we really need to worry about this change?  According to Harvard Professor Regina Herzinger ¹, consumers are on their way to figuring out the intricacies of health care just like they figured out complex phenomenon like driving luxury cars and banking online.  Consumers are engaging – can you handle the truth?  Furthermore, technology is making its way into this archaic morass that we call health care delivery.  Technology is here to save the day and automate our suboptimal processes and less than stellar customer service- can you handle the truth?

Consumerism meets technology – we might need to call in the military to clean up after this mushroom cloud!

Here are a few of the truths and ways in which one might want to think of surviving these trials and tribulations.  Bootcamp!

1.     The e-Health Consumer is here.  Patients expect service and you better have a Few Good Men and Women to service them.  A Contact Center is a good start, oh and by the way Uncle Sam is forcing you to implement that pesky EMR – get to it soldier and get the patient portal up and running by 0600!

2.     Teamwork, Teamwork, Teamwork.  No more silos soldier – we want to see the Army, Navy, Airforce and even the Coast Guard all working together and getting along.  Ok, let’s see an integrated team of physicians, IT staff, operations, legal types and someone with project management skills rallying those troops. 

3.     No more waiting – are we waiting to be annihilated by the enemy?  Consumers want to see their results, chat with providers, schedule online and order their prescriptions in a secure portal not waiting on the phone – hup to it soldier!

4.     Engage the physician, they are your secret weapons.  Physicians can author content that patients will relish online, and oh, aye captain, they can get paid for it too!

5.     Have a military funeral for paternalistic medicine and move on. According to Pew America, 59% of all adults in the U.S. look online for health information; a consistent trend seen since 2002. ² The consumer is engaging, our teenagers’ generation is our next target – have you seem them online?  Wake up and smell the latrine private – get that EMR installed and stop doodling with that patient portal. 

The truth is that the old methods of delivering health care are leaving us and the age of the engaged consumer is here.  It is great that Uncle Sam threatens us with Meaningful Use Stage 2 for goodness sakes, but don’t you want to be ahead of this campaign?  In this new day of e-Health the truth is that you will only Army Crawl as far as your patient portal and consumer contact center will take you – oh, and you better be ready to service it all 24x7 soldier, because we know that this battle never sleeps!

Dr. Paone and I welcome your responses, comments and any questions you may have and hope you will be joining us for our workshop at the 2013 ACHE Congress in March 2013. For more information on the ACHE Congress go to http://www.ache.org/congress/  We are presenting on Wednesday March 13, 2013 from 8:45 a.m. – Noon CT at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, ILL. Our course, Partnering With Technology Professionals: Creating a Meaningful, Meaningful Use Strategy, is number 88 found on page 39 of the digital version of the brochure.

 

Also, register with www.inquisit.org and be the first to correctly guess this movie reference to be rewarded with Inquisit IQCards for free education!

 

  

¹ Herzlinger, Regina (1997). Market-driven health care; who wins, who loses in the transformation of America’s largest service industry. Reading, Mass,: Addison-Wesley Publishing.

 

² http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2011/November/Pew-Internet-Health.aspx