At Manage My Practice, we have always been fascinated by the opportunities created when innovation and technical advancements are applied to the Healthcare system. The intersection of technology and medical practice has always been one of the most exciting spaces in research and development because the challenges of the Human Body are some of the most daunting and emotionally charged of our endeavors. Curing diseases, diagnosing symptoms and improving and saving lives are among our most noble callings, so naturally they inspire some of our brightest thinkers and industry leaders.
As managers, providers and employees, we always have to be looking ahead at how the technology on our horizon will affect how our organizations administer health care. In the spirit of looking forward to the future, we present “2.0 Tuesday”, a weekly feature on Manage My Practice about how technology is impacting our practices, and our patient and group outcomes.
We hope you enjoy looking ahead with us, and share your ideas, reactions and comments below!
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Steve Jobs thought iCloud had the potential to store Medical Data
Apple’s recently announced iCloud service let’s you store pictures, movies, music, and documents in Apple’s “cloud”, or Internet storage system, and retrieve them with your iPhones, iPods, iPads, and Mac computers. Dr. Iltifat Husain, writing for the IMedicalApps blog notes that in the new biography of the Apple founder, Jobs mentioned that he thought even personal medical data would one day be stored in Apple’s iCloud. Cloud storage is all the rage right now in a lot of different areas of technology, but Jobs saying that medical data would be stored on the consumer end next to vacation photos and favorite songs represents a very bold vision of the future of patient data.
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Researchers using Social Media to study attitudes about Public Health
A team led by Marcel Salath, PhD at Pennsylvania State University published a study last month in PLoS Computational Biology that used “tweets” gathered from the social network Twitter to analyze how the public felt about the H1N1 influenza vaccine in 2009. Although Social Media research has limitations, Christine S. Moyer, writing for the American Medical Association’s Amednews.com notes that the results were similar to traditional phone surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control, and provides some other examples of how Social Media has been used to understand public health trends.
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Interesting EHR/EMR data from the Soliant Health Blog
Medical staffing specialist Soliant Health had very eye-opening list of statistics about EHR/EMR implementations on their blog last week. My personal favorite: Hospitals using EHR/EMR systems have a 3 to 4% lower mortality rate than those that dont. Very interesting numbers.
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HealthWorks Collective predicts changes in healthcare communications after ACA
Healthworks Collective‘s Susan Gosselin makes some predictions about how the communications between and among providers and patients are going to be changed by the Affordable Care Act (or Healthcare Reform)- and what both groups will demand from a changing system. Great stuff!
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Oregon to help disabled voters cast ballots using iPads
In today’s local and congressional elections, five counties in the state of Oregon are going to be equipping local officials with iPads preloaded with special touch-interface software to accompany people with physical or visual impairments, or who would otherwise have a hard time making it to the polls. The 9 to 5 Mac blog is reporting that the pilot program features hardware donated by Apple, and could soon spread statewide by the next election.
Be sure to check back next week for another 2.0 Tuesday!
The Third Annual Health Care Social Media Summit took place on the Mayo Clinic campus in Rochester, Minnesota last week, and to my chagrin, I was unable to attend. Lots of good information and resources were shared, including this video. It was posted on YouTube on October 14th and has already been viewed more than 10,000 times.
Mayo Clinic wouldn’t mind if the video went viral, but really wants the message to go viral. For information about installing the “Know Your Numbers” app on your hospital or practice Facebook page, contact Makala Johnson at Johnson.Makala@mayo.edu.
Last week I gave a talk to a group of Transworld salespeople from across the United States. Transworld is the top name in collections across a variety of industries and they asked me to give a presentation on “How to Use Social Media to Reach Your Target Audience,” with the target audience being…people like you and me: managers, administrators, healthcare executives, and pretty much anyone in healthcare dealing with patient accounts receivables.
I described how much harder it is for today’s manager to make time to meet with salespeople. More than ever administrators are pulled in a million different directions, and it is not unusual for a manager’s priorities to shift from day to day and hour to hour. This must be incredibly frustrating for the salesperson who is trying to keep things flowing, but it’s a fact of life in healthcare.
Chris Brogan
In my talk I featured the work of two gentleman who really get how social media can positively impact sales. Chris Brogan is a prolific author and consultant who always has an interesting perspective on social media. I discussed his ideas around the sales circle as opposed to the sales cycle. You can read about it here.
There are moments when the physician-centric world needs to engage an attorney. Please don’t hesitate to pick up the phone when the FBI shows up with a search warrant!
There are other moments when you and the physicians you work with do not need an attorney for boiler-plate contracts. How do you tell the difference?
What an attorney can do for you
Areas that an attorney can help your office include (but by no means are limited to):
- Audit requests from RACs and insurers
- Contractual and corporate organization documents
- Human resource issues
- Credentialing and privileging disputes
- Ethical and disciplinary reviews
- Quality, peer-review and risk management
Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking to the Fayetteville (NC) Area Medical Group Managers Association (FAMMA) and we had a lively discussion about social media and healthcare. Here’s the link that you can use to download my powerpoint presentation.
Healthcare is changing. It is changing to eliminate waste of money, time and resources. It is changing to make more care available with less providers. It is changing to empower patients to participate in their own care. How are you changing with the times in 2011? Here are 9 ideas.
- Make your website interactive, clean-looking, interactive, friendly and interactive. Think of your website as your digital receptionist to your practice. If all your patients can do on your website is look up your phone number, you’re wasting everyone’s time. Patients want to register, make appointments, pay their bill, get their test results, chat online with a staff member, access their personal health record (PHR), watch videos and listen to podcasts you make or recommend. They do not want to wander around your phone tree or wait on hold.
- Give your patients information, information, information. According to a MedTera study conducted in September 2010, 95% surveyed indicated that they are looking for more comprehensive information about disease management, and 77% said they hadn’t received any written information about their illness or medications directly from the physician. See more details about what patients want here.
- Understand that people have different types of learning styles and offer your practice and medical information in different ways. Offer information via written and digital documents, videos, and podcasts. Offer support groups and group education for the newly diagnosed. Help patients build communities around your practice.
- Take down all those signs asking people to turn off their cell phones. Cell phones are going to revolutionize healthcare so go ahead and bite the bullet and embrace them. For all you know the person on the cellphone when you walk in the exam room is texting “gr8 visit til now, wil i <3 doc?” (Great visit until now, will I love the doctor?)
- Eliminate the Wait. Patients have much better things to do than wait in your practice. It doesn’t matter why the provider’s late – you’re cutting into the patient’s ability to make money and get things done. Text them to let them know the provider is running late. Text them to let them know an earlier appointment is available. Give patients an appointment range (between 10am and 12N), then text them when their appointment is 20 minutes away.
- Use a patient portal to take credit cards, keeping them securely on file and stop sending patients statements. Use the portal to deliver results and chat and email patients.
- Stop fighting the tide and let your staff use social media at work – for work. Involve everyone in Facebook, Twitter and your website and blog. Using social media for communication and marketing is not a one-person job.
- Form a patient advisory board and listen to what specifics your patients want from you. If people don’t have time to attend a face-to-face meeting, Skype them in.
- Think about alternate service delivery models, both in-person (group visits, home visits) and digitally (email, texting, Skyping, avatar coaches, home monitoring systems.) Emotional technology studies show that people can improve their health by accepting and utilizing technology in healthcare.
What do patients want in 2011? They want information, communication and a real connection with you. Use social media and technology innovations to make it happen.
Photo credit Image by gumption via Flickr
I could write thousands of words about Adrian Segar and “Conferences That Work” because my conversation with him went that far and that long and he was that interesting to speak with.
Adrian told me “I am on my fifth career” and that “the arch of my life makes sense.” What a wonderful thing – to have one’s life make sense.
He has been an academic, a physicist, an IT consultant, a conference developer, and now, a consultant to others searching for ways to make conferences work. His book “Conferences That Work” was published last year and is now gaining the recognition it deserves. Among others, he has been consulting with MGMA on the new “EDGE” program they are unveiling for 800 people in March 2011.
Adrian and I covered a range of topics and we discussed my dwindling interest in attending conferences for the past several years. He, too, had been disappointed in conferences – even those he organized – and was determined to find why traditional conference aren’t making the grade any more.
His book outlines four assumptions that traditional conference planners make:
Assumption #1. Conference session topics must be chosen and
scheduled in advance.
Assumption #2. Conference sessions are primarily for
transmitting pre-planned content.
Assumption #3. Supporting meaningful connections with other
attendees is not the conference organizers job; its something
that happens in the breaks between sessions.
Assumption #4. Conferences are best ended with some event that will hopefully convince attendees to stay to the end.
Adrian’s starting point was the current conference model of passive learning – letting others choose the topics and speakers and offering attendees limited opportunities for anything besides pre-determined content. He moved from the model of passive learning to peer learning – leveraging the power and knowledge of the attendees to harness the hot topics of THAT MOMENT, not the moment that the conference committee met to determine the educational content 12 months or even 6 months ago. He noted that the best conference committees are able to guess less than 50% of what attendees really want from a conference.
Adrian uses the example of social media to illustrate the difference between broadcasting information (old) and partnering to share information (new), and notes that the goal of Conferences That Work is to “bring the resources of all attendees to each attendee.” I’ve been to a one-day meeting that accomplished that goal and I left the “camp” feeling energized, overrun with ideas and already connected through Twitter with almost everyone at the well-attended program. It was amazing.
If you are developing meetings or conferences for your church, your charity, your local or state managers group or for any other type of group, or if you want to see the future of conferences, you owe it to yourself to read “Conferences That Work” by Adrian Segar. He’s on a mission and he’s going to design and rock a conference that you, if you’re lucky, will attend some day soon.
Excerpts from his book are available here.
Free downloads to assist in making conferences that work are here.
His blog is excellent and can be found here.
I am amazed and thrilled to have have been named one of FierceHealthcare’s “10 Bloggers We Are Thankful For.”
I am in delightful company as the other nine bloggers are writers I read and admire. 33Charts is one of my very favorite blogs, both because of the focus on social media in healthcare and because I just really like Dr. V’s writing.
There aren’t many practice management-related blogs on the web today, but some I recommend are askleslie.net (Leslie Johnson) for all your coding questions, pediatricinc.com (Brandon Betancourt) for insights from a pediatric manager married to a pediatrician, and practicemanagersolutions.com (Rebecca Morehead) for great motivational commentary and practical advice.
Don’t forget to stop by www.fiercehealthcare.com and visit their sites on healthcare IT, practice management and finance.
What blogs do you read and recommend to the readers of MMP?
Image via Wikipedia
Recently the Mayo Clinic launched its Center for Social Media and announced the names of 13 well-suited social media stars to sit on its volunteer external advisory board. An additional 12 people will be chosen from nominations and applications. This post is my application.
I’ve been writing about social media in healthcare since I read Phil Bauman’s groundbreaking “140 Healthcare Uses for Twitter” almost two years ago. The exciting potential for social media in healthcare settings is also cause for apprehension among administrators and clinical staff. What once was so hidden, so cloistered, so proprietary, so inscrutable is now emerging into the sunlight and is becoming collaborative, transparent, open, consumerist and available. It’s refreshing and scary.
I started my career in healthcare as a temp receptionist in an orthopedic office over 25 years ago. I have been a consultant, a private practice manager of small practices, a Chief Operating Officer of a very large practice. I’ve worked with physicians and care providers of all kinds in settings both rural and urban, for-profit and not-for-profit, and I have done most everything in healthcare except serve on the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media Advisory Board. (hint)
For the talent portion of my program, I will be interviewing myself live.
Q: Tell us something interesting about yourself.
A: I was Butler County (PA) Junior Miss of 1976 (a brains pageant with some physical fitness thrown in for good measure.)
Q: What is your greatest regret?
A: I wish I had taken touch typing in high school.
Q: Are you a cat person or dog person?
A: A cat person but I get along well with dogs.
Q: Favorite charity?
A: My brother is a missionary in Ukraine and his organization (www.muchhope.org) helps disadvantaged children with food, clothing, healthcare and education.
Q: How do feel about shameless plugs?
A: I find them tacky, but ultimately necessary.
Q: What social media apps do you use?
A: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, GoAnimate, Wellsphere, WordPress Blog
Q: What is your favorite social media app for healthcare?
A: Ummm. Pass.
Q: Why you?
A: Why not me? I’m a patient, a mom, a wife, a healthcare manager, a social media groupie, a blogger, a reader, a thinker, a cartoonist, a learner, a writer, an observer of life. Every board needs me.
Q: What is the future of social media in healthcare?
A: Mobile, for sure, and I think QR codes have tremendous promise.
Q: What is your favorite social media app for healthcare?
A: Facebook. The potential is unlimited.
Q: Last question: “healthcare.” One word or two?
A: One.
NOTE: If my beloved readers wish to support my appointment to the MCCSM Advisory Board, please Tweet about me with the hashtag #mccsc, leave a comment on the MCCSM blog here, or send an email of support to socialmediacenter@mayo.edu. Thank you!
