Healthcare Talent Transformation

Learn more about the 4th Annual Becker's Hospital Review Conference

Below is a conference that many of our readers may find worthwhile attending. The speakers our outstanding and the sessions look timely for healthcare issues today.  Please let me know what you think. 

Jonena

 

4th Annual Becker's Hospital Review Meeting

May 9-11, 2013
Chicago, IL

Content reposted from Becker's Hospital Review.

"This exclusive conference brings together hospital business and strategy leaders to discuss how to improve your hospital and its bottom line in these challenging but opportunity-filled times. The best minds in the hospital field will discuss opportunities for hospitals plus provide practical and immediately useful guidance on ACOs, physician-hospital integration, improving profitability and key specialties.

Highlights include:

• 93 sessions and 125 speakers
• Great keynote speeches by Lou Holtz, former college football coach, active sportscaster, author and motivational speaker, and Patrick Lencioni, founder and president of The Table Group, author of ten best selling books
• Keynote panels led by Bret Baier of Fox News' "Special Report with Bret Baier," and former chief White House correspondent
• Co-chaired by Charles S. Lauer, author, consultant, speaker and former publisher of Modern Healthcare magazine

More information: Becker's Hospital Review

To Register: Call 800-417-2035 - Fax: 866-678-5755

Email: registration@beckershealthcare.com. 

Hotel reservations:
Westin Michigan Avenue has set aside special group rates for conference attendees. To make a reservation, click here .
Westin Michigan Avenue
909 North Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60611
Phone:  312-943-7200

Group name: Becker's Hospital Review Annual Meeting
Conference group rate: $259 Single/Double

Discounted rates apply until the reservation deadline April 12, 2013, or until all rooms in the group block have been reserved, whichever occurs first. After April 12, 2013, guest rooms and discounted group rates may not be available.

Keynote speakers:

Coach Lou Holtz

Lou Holtz has established himself as one of the most successful college football coaches of all time.

Born Louis Leo Holtz on January 6, 1937, Holtz grew up in East Liverpool, Ohio, just up the Ohio River from his Follansbee, West Virginia, and birthplace. He graduated from East Liverpool High School, earned a Bachelor of Science degree in history from Kent State in 1959 and a master's degree from Iowa in arts and education in 1961. He played linebacker at Kent State for two seasons before an injury ended his career. He has received four honorary doctorate degrees.

Holtz is the only coach in the history of college football to: 1) Take 6 different teams to a bowl game. 2) Win five bowl games with different teams. 3) To have four different college teams ranked in the final Top 20 poll.

Currently, Holtz serves as a college football studio analyst on ESPN. He appears on ESPNEWS', ESPN College GameDay programs, SportsCenter as well as serves as an on site analyst for college football games.

Holtz has authored three New York Times best-selling books The Fighting Spirit that chronicled Notre Dame's 1988 championship season and Winning Everyday: A Game Plan For Success (August 1998), which has been published in several languages. His latest book which was released August 15, 2006 is Wins, Losses and Lessons, an autobiography of his life and the lessons he has learned, and is also a best seller.

Patrick Lencioni

Patrick Lencioni is founder and president of The Table Group, a firm dedicated to providing organizations with ideas, products and services that improve teamwork, clarity and employee engagement.

Lencioni's passion for organizations and teams is reflected in his writing, speaking and executive consulting. He is the author of ten best-selling books with over three million copies sold. After ten years in print, his book "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" continues to be a fixture on national best-seller lists. His latest book, "The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business," became an immediate national best-seller.

The wide-spread appeal of Lencioni's leadership models have yielded a diverse base of speaking and consulting clients, including a mix of Fortune 500 companies, professional sports organizations, the military, non-profits, schools and churches.

Lencioni addresses thousands of leaders each year at world class organizations and national conferences. Consistently the top rated keynote speaker at major events, he shares his insights and inspires his audiences through his accessibility, humor and story-telling.

Named in Fortune magazine as one of the ‘ten new gurus you should know,’ Pat and his work have been featured in USA TODAY, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Harvard Business Review, to name a few.

Prior to founding his firm, he worked as a corporate executive for Sybase, Oracle and Bain & Company. Pat lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and four sons.

Bret Baier

Bret Baier serves as the anchor of Fox News Channel's (FNC) Special Report with Bret Baier, the number one cable news program in its timeslot (6-7 p.m. ET). Before assuming this role, which he took over for Brit Hume in January of 2009, Baier served as chief White House correspondent, where he reported on presidential activities on a national and international level from 2006-2009. Prior to being named chief White House correspondent, Baier served as national security correspondent and reported on military and national security affairs, as well as on defense, military policy and the intelligence community from the Pentagon from 2001-2006.

Throughout his career, Baier has secured numerous exclusive interviews with government officials. He had the only interview with President Obama during the week leading up to the historic health care vote in the House of Representatives in March 2010. Additionally, Baier has interviewed President George W. Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace. He has also spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in anticipation of key peace talks at the United Nations, Polish President Lech Kaczynski days after the U.S. decision to abort missile defense plans in Poland, and Georgian

President Mikheul Saakashvili after the Russian invasion of Georgia. In addition, Baier had an exclusive sit-down with General Petraeus, which was his final interview as the head of U.S. operations, live from Iraq in September 2008. A graduate of DePauw University, Baier has a bachelor's degree in Political Science and English.

Chuck Lauer (Co-Chair of Annual Meeting)

Charles S. Lauer was the publisher of Modern Healthcare for more than 30 years, taking it from a monthly money-losing proposition when Crain Communications purchased the magazine in 1976 to the nation's leading healthcare news weekly. Known throughout the healthcare industry and beyond as a leader, Chuck Lauer is now a healthcare consultant, an author, public speaker and award-winning businessman who is in demand for his motivational messages to top companies nationwide.

Lauer's career includes early success as a retail representative for Life magazine at Time, Inc., and later as a drug merchandising manager of Look. The consummate salesman, he served as Midwest Sales Manager for two McGraw-Hill trade publications and was general sales manager for the publications of the American Medical Association where he became the AMA's director of communications. He also held various positions with Family Media, Inc. and Petersen Publishing. He is a graduate of MiddleburyCollege in Vermont, Mr. Lauer served in the United States Army as a corporal during the Korean War and continued his postgraduate education at the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois."

Do you use your computer or mobile device to research your healthcare questions?

Jonena Relth, TBD Consulting

I was a bit surprised that the newest Pew study shows that consumers are not flocking the Internet now more than in the last 12 years to research their health issues. 

As someone who is on the computer more hours a day than I'd like to admit, I can't think of a better way to start my research than to go to WebMD, Google, etc., to help me get my thoughts together and decide if I should "start panicking now" or wait until I confirmed my self-diagnosis with my Doc. Seriously, the Internet is here for our use, but it will never replace my Doc and her opinions! We should only visit reputable sites to conduct our research.  For my health, Wikipedia will probably not be the place I'll start or end my medial research...

More surprising in the study is the amount of diminishing sites created for consumers to compare drugs and medical treatments. I can only speculate on their demise, but I'd put my money on pressure from "the powers that be" and/or financial issues. 

Health data is complicated, often confusing and not always easy to find.  If access to content on comparison sites were free, I believe that consumers would flock to the sites. There is always the good 'ol American advertising avenue that the site owners could use to earn the all mighty buck so they'd keep the data up to data.

1) Take a look at the Pew study Pew: 35 percent of US adults are online diagnosers and let me know what you think.

2) Do you use your computer or modile device to research your healthcare questions?

Jonena

TBD Consulting has a proven track record for ensuring staff and physician adoption of EMR/EHR system implementations as well as Lean Healthcare. Whether you need assistance to create a training department or organizational change department, help your existing training organization meet the needs of the ongoing changes, or simply need "extra hands" to meet your deadlines or ROI goals, please contact Jonena. She and her qualified staff are here to assist you with your organizational development, coaching and training initiatives.

Docs like VistA - Shouldn't We Give this a Second or Third Look?

If your hospital is still in the market for an enterprise EHR/EMR, I'd suggest that you add this study to your research: 2012 Medscape survey says physicians prefer VistA Enterprise EHR Over Epic Systems based on 21,000 physicians in 25 specialties evaluating enterprise EHRs

Two recent surveys clearly show that when it comes to enterprise EHRs, physicians prefer the VA's VistA.

In a 2012 survey by Medscape, 21,000 physicians in 25 specialties were asked to evaluate enterprise EHRs in hospital-based health delivery networks based on 12 characteristics ranging from ease of use, value and overall usefulness, etc.

When the focus is on particular performance and adoption issues, the report shows that VistA is consistently preferred by physicians over other enterprise EHRs. And on overall ease of use
and intuitive design, for example, VistA was rated 8^th, while Epic was 11^th and Cerner 29^th.

I find this report very interesting as so many pundits put VistA down because it's not as robust with bells and whistles -- and yes a little less pleasing to the eye.  So, over the last few years, I keep bringing up VistA in conversations and ask, "Why pay for bells and whistles that take so much extra customization that won't bring extra value to the output?" (So far, I haven't received a satisfactory answer that has quenched my curiosity!)

On a personal note:  Over the past many years, we've documented and trained the "big boy" EMRs as well as VistA and found VistA much more user friendly and easier to train.  VistA isn't as "pretty" and doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Epic or Cerner, but it gets the job done for many hospitals.

Here is a training comparison:  

• When working with a large hospital system implementing Cerner, it required creating 460 short eLearning lessons to train all the modules within Cerner.  
• However, to train all the docs and staff at a local NY hospital only required 64 eLearning lessons to thoroughly train and get everyone up to speed on VistA.    
• To document and train Cerner was obviously MUCH HIGHER than accomplishing the same goals with VistA. 

All and all, physicians and everyone else were pleased to learn how to integrate VistA with their workflows as it's a less complicated system that cost less to purchase, customize, train and master.

Considerations from a cost perspective:

• Perhaps FREE code that you customize and own might be a better route than being tied into a proprietary system.  This isn't for everybody, but if you have the IT skills in house, it's worth a look.
• One must consider that the majority of US physicians are not hospital employees, so many hospitals pay the docs to take the training. Why you ask? Well, the docs are losing revenue when they are taking training, so the hospitals incentivize the docs to learn how to use the hospital's EMR. Our experience has been that because VistA training takes so much less time, attendance and adoption are higher, thus eliminating a lot of implementation headaches. 
• Additionally, it takes less on-sight, follow-up by coaches and superusers with VistA.

Don't get me wrong, I want to remain neutral vendor and not align our services with any particular tool, but I am just suggesting that maybe we should give this product (code) our tax dollars paid for a second or third look.  VistA isn't perfect, but it certainly has its good points that should be considered when buying an EMR/EHR. 

Jonena

 

Other blogs by Jonena to consider:

A Case for Implementing Open Source EMR/EHR

So, Who is Easier to get On-board with EMR Training and Use?

Redesign Your Workflows BEFORE Customizing and Implementing an EHR!

Unintended Consequences of EHR Implementations

Why do We Need Customized EMR/EHR Training? - My Final Answer!

How to Save Millions of Dollars on EMR System Implementations

We're living in EMR/EHR Stockholm Syndrome Days

Jonena Relth, TBD Consulting

I responded today to a LinkedIn post from John Lynn,  Does the Stockholm Syndrome apply to EMRs? ".  I thought our readers would appreciate the topic, so I decided to share the article and my response with our wider healthcare audience.

*************************************************************************

I definitely think we're living in "EMR/EHR Stockholm Syndrome" days. Until we open our minds, take risks and open the door to new innovation from creative, new companies, we will get the clumsy, out-of-date EHR/EMR technology offered by the established software players.

In the 21 years I've been in business, I've seen this in so many areas, not just healthcare IT. When projects go south, we still hear from VPs, Directors and CEOs to their Boards, "Well we hired the best [most expensive] consulting firm.  If they can't get it right, nobody can!" 

That is bunk and we all know it.  Americans are known for creativity, innovation and guts.  When we only stick with the "safe" decisions [older established vendors], we don't allow our companies to thrive and get ahead of the competition.

The question I'd pose is this: What is Best of Breed in EHR/EMRs today?

Best of Breed should indicate that the system:  

• Reduces workflow time
• Helps the clinicians work smarter, not harder
• Reduces errors while making it possible to provide efficient, quality patient care, and
• Provides interoperable data bases that are totally searchable.   

Unfortunately, we're working with systems that are far behind those in non-medical fields. I don't see Best of Breeds making their way into the healthcare market place today. Until we open our minds to taking risks and open our pocketbooks to new innovations from creative, new companies, we will get the clumsy, out-of-date EHR/EMR technology offered by the "big boys."

Help me  shake up the Status Quo!

Jonena

 

TBD Consulting has a proven track record for ensuring staff and physician adoption of EMR/EHR system implementations as well as overall process improvements. Whether you need assistance to create a Training Department or Lean Academy, or help your existing training organization meet the communication needs of the ongoing changes, or simply need "extra hands" to meet your deadlines or ROI goals, please contact Jonena. She and her qualified staff are here to assist you with your organizational development, coaching and training initiatives.

Corporate Office 602-263-1961   Email Jonena today!

Learn about the BUSINESS of Medicine

We are pleased to introduce our newest blogger, Andrea Morgan. Andrea is the founder and President of AndreaKnowsEMR.com  As an EpicCare Ambulatory Certified technical trainer and consultant with over 15 years of pharmaceutical and EMR training experience, her areas of expertise include project management, curriculum development, and instructor led training as well as providing support to multiple medical specialties before, during and after EMR implementations.

The implementation of an electronic medical records system impacts the providers fundamental ability to make money. We have to be cognizant of this as we make decisions that will impact that business. It isn’t enough to say that software is user-friendly or intuitive and that productivity will return to normal *eventually* when the real costs of losing productivity can be jobs and practice stability.

I’m not advocating learning about billing per se, but about all the things that impact a provider’s financials – staff costs, office space, insurance, licensing, pretzels in the break room – for the purpose of looking at the EMR as a tool to support the existing functions and have as little negative impact as possible.

I recently read a great book by Dr. Steven Hacker, The Medical Entrepreneur that goes into great detail about the business aspects of setting up a medical practice. This book provides excellent depth of knowledge for a topic that is often overlooked by consultants and even by providers.

When assessing EMR solutions, very often providers want to know the bottom line – how much will it cost, how long will it take, how frustrated will I be – and while those answers may be (relatively) easy to come up with, they may not encompass the business costs on a holistic (as opposed to strictly fiscal) level.

For consultants, I think this book will give excellent insight on how to best support the practice during the implementation process. Understanding how the business of medicine works can only improve the level of analysis, quality of solutions and empathy that you will be able to provide to client.

Good Business Acumen for Healthcare IT

David Scher, MD, DLS Healthcare Consulting

When one discusses business acumen, it is usually applied to individuals.  What I plan to discuss is the business acumen that hospital administrators should have when considering implementation of IT and mHealth technologies. 

It is well known that one of the biggest priorities of hospital administrators today is implementing IT technologies that will have their institutions meet Meaningful Use (MU) standards.  The most important step in this process in my view is having the right Chief Information Officer (CIO) in place.  Many hospitals did not invest or invest wisely in CIOs. Good ones are now hard to find. There are presently hospitals that are actually outsourcing this position. The job is taking on increasing importance, not only because of the focus on MU, but because of the role of the CIO in implementing even more complex projects including wireless technologies and strengthening IT security (a daily headline grabber). Along with the CIO are other IT employees.  Many IT workers wanting to get into healthcare are getting formally trained but are being turned away while being told they do not have enough clinical experience. These people might thrive under the right administrator and support.

Good business acumen is always planning for the future. That includes budget planning and care coordination around outcomes-based and patient satisfaction-driven reimbursement.  Out-of-the-box thinking is required for this. Wireless health technologies including remote monitoring, patient adherence, diabetic, COPD, telemedicine, and others will be adopted by those with a superior vision, I believe.

The above points may seem simplistic but are quite critical. The basics include the right leadership and vision. A good CIO who adopts technologies which are game changers is the formula. Understood in this discussion is the administrative and financial support given the CIO by the CEO, who likewise needs to share this vision. It is a difficult road for hospitals that plan on weathering the storm ahead.  Let’s plan carefully and invest wisely in key personnel and technologies.   

David Lee Scher, MD, FACP, FACC, FHRS, is Director at DLS HEALTHCARE CONSULTING, LLC concentrating in clinical and business development of wireless health products. He is a former cardiac electrophysiologist with 20 years experience as a well-respected clinical trial investigator, human subject research committee chair, Medicare committee member, and medical device industry consultant and key opinion leader. Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Cardiovascular Diseases, and Clinical Cardiac Electrophysiology, Dr. Scher was a pioneer adopter of remote patient monitoring. He lectures worldwide on the benefits of wireless technologies.

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/david-lee-scher-md/27/16a/90

Dr. Scher can be reached at: dlschermd@gmail.com

Twitter:dlschermd

Health Wonk Review: Unadorned

Health Wonk Review Unadorned edition is posted for this week. Thanks to the Health Affairs Blog for hosting.

TBD Consulting's president, Jonena Relth, has been watching a lively LinkedIn discussion among healthcare executives, and “the one piece of the puzzle I haven’t heard mentioned is that of patients now demanding that their health care be more cost-effective.” One way to make care more cost-effective would be to limit damages in malpractice suits. Read Jonena's entire post: What Can Healthcare Learn from the Business World?

HEALTH WONK REVIEW: All Hallows Eve Edition

With the mid-term election candidates scaring up votes and Halloween just days away, we hope you aren't to frightened by this week's Health Wonk Review.

New Learning Modalities Advance Health IT

Posted by: Peggy Salvatore, www.healthsystemed.com

Online learning, e-learning, m-learning, asynchronous learning, web-based curriculum. What do you call it? What is it? And what might it have to contribute to transforming healthcare?

At an ASTD (American Society for Training and Development) Chapter board meeting last spring, we elected to start a special interest group to discuss elearning, and we grappled with finding an identity for what historically has been known as computer-based training. As it turned out, no matter what definitions we used, the concept generated a lot of enthusiasm from our own members and people outside our organization. To date, our elearning special interest group started just two months ago has met or broken attendance records for its first two online meetings.

Knowing our experience, I was a little surprised to see this link in the eLearning Insider Newsletter this week:

Is the LMS Dead?

My answer to that question is another question: Have We Even Started to Tap the Potential of the LMS?

More likely, online knowledge capture, transfer, and measurement for organizational improvement is in its infancy. Even bricks and mortar institutions are looking at their asynchronous classroom offerings and seeing their web-based future. This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education asked the survey question: What role does online learning play on your campus? And then posted this announcement:

"Due to an overwhelming response from our readers, the Online Learning Survey will remain open until Friday, October 29. Don't miss this opportunity to voice your opinions. Online, distance, and blended learning programs are playing a significant role in the way institutions deliver courses and are becoming a part of many institution’s strategic plans."

The move to web-based, asynchronous, online, mobile learning – partnered with social media platforms – means the way we relate education and information can be real-time, all the time. This has important implications for bringing nearly 20% of our economy online and all moving in the same direction. Healthcare (which yes, does account for almost 20% of our economy today) will need to bring millions of providers online in a unified and concerted way to extract the true value and benefit of electronic patient records.

We need face-to-face, boots on the ground teachers to translate some of the high-touch aspects of patient interactions to fully electronic patient records, but a lot of the education can be done in a consistent way, with rapid deployment at the point of service, using all the elearning modalities available to us today.

The LMS isn’t dead. It is one very important piece of a growing healthcare pie.

Peggy Salvatore writes training for the healthcare industry. She developed Health System Ed, a basic health IT training program to advance the uptake of electronic patient records. In addition to the basic e-learning program available online, Health System Ed can be customized for specific healthcare environments and software applications. To learn more about Health System Ed visit www.healthsystemed.com

Natural Evolution of Change Takes Awhile. Got Time?

Posted by: Peggy Salvatore

You might have people who accept the evolutionary change and stay, people who don’t and leave, or people who can’t and are eventually eliminated by some organizational variant of natural selection.

In moving from a paper-based to electronic medical records system, change may appear in either form in an organization. It may come in as a revolution and up-end the status quo, sweeping away the old way of business and bringing with it all new systems and processes. For most organizations, federal mandates are the change agent. Do it or don’t get paid (eventually).

Without government mandates, without a doubt, electronic medical records would eventually be integrated into the healthcare environment through a more gentle, evolutionary process. Simply, medical schools are graduating tech-savvy providers who are used to doing everything online. The nurses, doctors, pharmacists, staff and executives in healthcare organizations do everything better, faster and smarter with technology in other areas of their lives. Over time, healthcare providers will expect to take those technological advantages to work with them.

Because the change is being pushed from the top down, rather than being sought from the bottom up, it takes a little more organized effort from the training and human resources staff to pull through the technology. In a revolutionary change model, you’ve gotta prepare people for change and the new technology you are requiring;  in the evolutionary change model, you just have to manage the naturally occurring change and supply the technology for people who are seeking it.

Most healthcare organizations are in a revolutionary, top-down mode for managing the change in their environments. Some organizations are in the evolutionary, bottom-up mode, but they are still fewer and farther between. [HIMSS EMR Adoption Model]

In another generation, the full integration of IT into the healthcare environment would be a natural and evolutionary process. And that might seem like a kinder, gentler approach. But you have to start somewhere, sometime, setting standards and goals, and putting the network in place to handle the integration. That calls for a revolution of sorts – change here, change now, and change according to a master plan. That’s where we are today.

By requiring providers to integrate health information technology into their work environments now, the federal government is pushing the revolution from the top down. What that means in terms of organizational development is that the change will require some hands-on management from the people responsible for pulling it off on the ground.

Evolution is nice, things change according to the natural flow of events within the context of their times. Revolution sometimes is necessary to move things firmly forward toward a defined vision in an organized way.

Welcome to the revolution.