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I have written on these pages about a cross-occupational invasion of medicine by IT personnel, wherein the IT personnel seem to forget that they are facilitators of healthcare, not enablers, with a primary purpose of serving the needs of clinicians. Read the rest of this entry »
26
Theres not a lot more to say here as he had the battle with brain cancer and was very courageous right up to the very end. We lost an ally in 
healthcare today too. This comes almost right on the heels of the death of Eunice Kennedy Shriver. BD
25
We all heard the President mention Mayo Clinic being an example for the rest of the system to explore and see what they are doing right. Much of the efficiencies revolve around Health IT, as mentioned below doctors can stay where they are and all collaborate without physically having to get in a car, or walk even within the facility to discuss a patient chart. With electronic records they can all be looking at the same chart at the same time.
25
I have said it many times before… An apology goes a long way to prevent litigation. Now when I say it, no one believes me because I am a “tort lawyer” / “ambulance chaser” - you know the stereotype.
24
This story keeps getting better all the time, almost like a soap opera of sorts as the series of events has had a little bit of everything as the plot 
thickens. This has no reflection on the people and employees of the 4 hospitals, who are caught in the middle, wondering how future financing will continue. There are guns, yachts, cars, and money all throughout the saga.
24
A somewhat remarkable new book will be released in Nov. 2009 by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), of which I am an associate editor. It is aimed at the non-medical- informatics IT and healthcare management professional. I express thanks to AHIMA for their forward thinking in accepting and publishing this material.
24
On Wall Street it is called program trading, in health insurance it could be called program insuring as it comes down to the same controlling factor, algorithms. Anyone who has read this blog for the last 2 years probably thinks I have some kind of love affair going on with that word, but having written code myself, its how the world and business works. I am nowhere near the level of sophistication of what we are talking about here 
by any means, but any coder can tell you the power that lies within.
23
Granted this is not mainstay yet, but as I have mentioned before, you may not be able to count on the current business models to stay the way they are with insurance, as everything today out there seems to be subject to change, like daily. So far it has only been a small number of patients who opted to stay in the US that were offered tourism packages, but as saving money stays up front in everyones mind, could there be more pressure on employers to promote medical tourism, and the effects on the doctors and hospitals again mean less money.
22
When it comes to security you cant take too many precautions. This article from the LA Times talks about someone who used to be on the other side who now is unleashed by his employer to see if your system can be hacked. The scary thing in this article is that hes not found one he cant hack, so if you want to have your system checked to see how secure it really is, this could be the guy.
22
Heres a short post that I made back in January of 2008. After having made this post I had an anonymous comment and I thought in light of where we are today with health insurance that perhaps I would bring this one around again. What is interesting in the comment section is that this individual states they are the CIO of one of the largest healthcare companies in the world, but they remain anonymous. This is a must read as they state my 
comments cause CIOs to struggle with their role in business, gosh I never knew I had that kind of power (grin).