A short film demonstrating the “surprising limits of perception, attention, and awareness.”  Viewers are instructed to count bounces or baskets made by one team, and in doing so, completely miss that a person in a gorilla suit walks among the players!  Viewers are astounded when viewing the video a second time and seeing the gorilla.   The video is part of a 2003 DVD Surprising Studies of Visual Awareness, Volume 1 produced by Viscog Productions, Inc.

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The Medical Home, also called the Patient-Centered Medical Home, and the Personal Medical Home, is a movement to solve the problem of fragmented care (one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing) by having a primary care physician or practitioner act as the center of all care information for the patient.   Fragmented care is dangerous (lack of coordination of care causes mistakes and mistreatments), costly (repetition of diagnostic tests and regimens), and wasteful of healthcare resources.  The Medical Home plan goals are to provide care for all individuals, improve care, and decrease healthcare costs.

“Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century” was published in 2001 by the Institute of Medicine.  In this landmark book, the patient’s role and responsibility for navigating the healthcare system and acting as the information hub around which the spokes of primary, specialty and tertiary care providers revolve was denounced
continue reading "What is a Medical Home?"

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An article authored by Kurt Cagle, online editor for O’Reilly Media, does a great job exploring telework which he defines as

…employees and contract workers performing their work out of the office – from home, from distributed work centers, from coffee-shops, indeed, from wherever those workers may happen to be at the time.

Probably the job most commonly performed off site for medical practices is transcription, with billing a close second.  More recently I’ve heard of triage nurses and registrars teleworking and if you  think about it, any job that can currently be filled by outsourcing (appointment reminders, appointment scheduling, switchboard, etc.) could be performed by your own employees offsite.

If you’re like me, you may have considered teleworkers for your practice, but worried about managing off site employees and keeping them bonded to the team.  Cagle discusses the ever-growing list of technologies available to stay connected, but does not underestimate other problems historically associated with telework.

Telework requires a certain degree of self-starting and responsibility. Ironically, a number of studies, including one performed by Sun in 2007 showed that one of the older stereotypes of teleworkers as people who would tend to do a little work then skip to some other activity, watch TV or surf the web actually proved to be something of a myth – for the most part most teleworkers actually tend to put in longer days working than they would in the office …

Other benefits of teleworking for employees:

• Savings on gas, parking and wardrobe
• Ability to self-schedule
• Gain personal time eliminating commute
• Customized workspace for each person: temperature, light, sound
• Reduction of the carbon footprint

Other benefits of teleworking for employers:

• Saves on expensive medical office square footage
• Fewer distractions could increase productivity
• Allows practice to grow without physical expansion
• Expands employee pool – employees can live anywhere
• Reduction of the carbon footprint

Read the entire article here.

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What have you done for your career lately?  Are you comfortable in your current job?  Are you happy?  Happy with your income?  Happy with your level of challenge?  What would you do if you lost your job tomorrow?

Do yourself a favor and invest a little time in your future.

At WordCamp recently, Lorelle VonFossen said “You need to think about having a digital presence.”

I suggest that signing up with LinkedIn (free) and building your online presence is a good start.  LinkedIn could be called the business version of FaceBook although many people use FaceBook as their business networking tool.  The general consensus is that for business LinkedIn is probably the most-used (25 million people) and best-known of the social networking websites.  Social networking uses the theory that we’re all connected to each other through those we know and that every other person on the Earth is connected by six other people, thus the term you’ve heard “six degrees of separation.”  You use these connections to network and meet people, ask and answer questions, and possibly, find jobs.

There’s a lot to completing your LinkedIn online profile, but you don’t have to do at all at one time.  I think my LinkedIn profile is about 75% complete and I’ve been working on it for a couple of months.  Take your time, do it right, then start to look into joining some LinkedIn groups to see what people are talking about.  The trick is not to get hundreds of people in your network (unless you’re a recruiter), but to build authentic relationships with people you think well of.

If you’re not sure what social networking can do for you, check out these articles:

Jobseekers are Beginning to Favor Social Networking Over Online Career Sites to Find Jobs

The Social Network as a Career Safety Net

LinkedIn: Old-School Network Isn’t Short of Fans

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Now for something a little bit different for my Monday morning resource post.  I came across two recently published studies that I found interesting – both about people tapping into the Internet for health information.

It doesn’t seem that long ago (it wasn’t!) that I first heard of people bringing information from the Internet in to discuss with their physician.  If I remember correctly, the general feeling among the docs was “Why are patients looking for information when I can give them everything they need to know?”  Wow, good question.  Today, it seems natural to me that patients seek information on the Internet.  I think it is fairly well-accepted that a patient who looks for information on the Internet is more likely to become engaged in their own health and an engaged patient is generally a better, and healthier patient.

The question I have is “What does an Internet-savvy patient population mean for my practice?”  A wonderful, difficult, scary question.  Think about this while you peruse the startling statistics below, and maybe link to the full stories to read more.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released information last week on what percentage of online Americans are seeking medical information online.

• 68% of online men look online for health info
• 81% of online women
• 76% of white internet users
• 65% of African-American internet users
• 71% of English-speaking Hispanic internet users
• 68% of 18-29 year-old internet users
• 78% of 30-49s
• 76% of 50-64s
• 71% of internet users age 65+

And in a related article, The Center for Studying Health System Change released information last month on sources (other than doctors) that people get their health information.  The bottom line is:

• Internet = 32% of the total population
• Magazines and Newspaper = 32% of the total population
• Friends and Family = 31% of the total population

Interestingly, TV and radio ranked quite low, which anyone watching the weekday morning shows can tell you – TV seems to report the health news, and all news, pretty much last.

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My practice spends about $9,000 a year going to the bank.  That’s what it costs for the time it takes for one person to open the envelopes, separate the checks from the EOBs, add the check totals, stamp the backs of the checks, copy/scan the checks, write the deposit slip and go to the bank on a daily basis.

Now my practice is evaluating one old option and one relatively new option.  The lockbox has been around for a long time, but as technology has become more sophisticated and less expensive, and time has become more valuable, the lockbox has seemingly become more affordable.  Evaluating it now, it seems like a great deal to have someone else perform all the steps listed above as well as having the check and EOB images stored online for easy access.

The newer option is the check reader that scans and uploads the check image to your bank, depositing a group of checks in the bank from the comfort of your own office.  BusinessWeek had a good overview of this technology in a video recently.  Click the link below to see the video.

High-Tech Banking
if you’re spending too much money depositing your money, maybe you should call your banker.

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©Jenny Woodworth/Dreamstime.com

My daughter has a big crush on Billy Mays and loves his products, but even she should draw the line at buying health insurance from him.

BusinessWeek’s recent article by Karyn McCormack includes the pitchmeister Mays’ endorsement of the iCan health insurance product, touted as “affordable” and “not some discount card.”

Someone advised me a long time ago that health insurance should be like car insurance. You buy it for the big stuff, not for maintenance, dings and scratches. Because the iCan plan that starts at $160 per month doesn’t have very rich benefits, the article notes that:

If you end up with a large medical bill, members of iCan’s health plans have a health advocate to negotiate pricing and hospital charges, says Harold Shatz, managing member of iCan Benefit Group in Boca Raton, Fla. A $40,000 to $50,000 medical bill can be reduced to $10,000 to $12,000 through network pricing and use of a health advocate to examine the bills and find errors, he says.

Jaded as I am, even I am dumbfounded by this offer for value-added service! Read the entire Story Here.

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When we first moved to the west coast, I was stunned to find that people routinely take two weeks of vacation off AT ONE TIME! On the east coast, my experience had been that taking more than a week off was reserved for getting married or going to Europe. Amazingly, and this was a revelation to me, people can take two weeks off at a time and the organization can go on! Now I am very much in favor of people taking longer vacations for a number of reasons:

1. It forces the organization to cross-train employees and to make sure that there are at least three people in the company that know how to do every critical task.
2. It requires the creation and maintenance of current, clearly written protocols associated with each job, in case the other two employees who are cross-trained on the job get sick, have jury duty, have a death in their family, or quit on short notice.
3. It gives the company an opportunity to assess the workload and composition of a job from another person’s viewpoint. We’ve all had the experience where someone goes on an extended leave and you find out that the job is much more, or less, complex that you thought, or someone was telling you.
4. It ensures that nothing untoward is going on with someone who has access to company money. Everyone’s heard of the manager who never takes a vacation, not because s/he’s so dedicated, but because s/he has sticky fingers.
5. It gives the employee an opportunity to truly rest, heal, and remember that there is life outside of work (can you tell I’m thinking about myself here?)

Here’s an excellent article that has some great points about the ethics of taking Vacations. The author, Bruce Weinstein, PhD states:

Leaving work behind for a period of time is not only acceptable; it is our ethical obligation.

My advice to each of you is to fulfill your ethical duty as soon as possible.

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NOTE: This post won’t make a bit of sense unless I tell you that my blog used to be called “healthpromeme.”  A bunch of people told me they didn’t get it and couldn’t remember it, so I changed it!

A number of people have asked about the name of this blog. My mother wrote to me and said she needed filled in on this “meme” thing. Wikipedia defines meme (rhymes with “seem”) this way:

A meme consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a “culture” in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus. As a unit of cultural evolution, a meme in some ways resembles a gene. Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, recounts how and why he coined the term meme to describe how one might extend Darwinian principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing-fashions, and the technology of building arches. – Wikipedia

When I was considering names for this blog, I was looking for something catchy, similar to Geeks Are Sexy, a favorite site of mine, or Execupundit, another favorite. After deciding on lots of excellent names, and finding none of them were names that were actually for sale, my son suggested healthpromeme, to describe the field I’m in and indicate some sort of hip factor. If you’re my age, you need your children to clue you in to things, and if you’re like me, you also need them to clue you in to when it’s time to stop saying stuff that isn’t hip anymore. It seems like I just got the hang of saying “jiggy with it” when my kids told me to stop it.

I hope you have kids to tell you when to stop it too.

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