Hard agree, and not just because I'm a spreadsheet nerd. Why are we all here? Isn't it in the service…
News 7/1/22
Top News
A NEJM perspective piece says that today’s care delivery policies and technologies sacrifice the “solution shop” work of doctors (solving patient problems and building patient trust) for “production line” work (approving prescription refills, entering orders, completing preventive screenings).
It notes that most of the patient visit can be consumed by clinicians completing EHR checkboxes, entering orders, manually completing prior authorization requests, and managing inbox messages.
It also observes that since it’s easier to measure the production line work in the EHR, quality metrics represent those tasks disproportionately.
The article also says that healthcare financial resources have moved away from direct patient care to tech companies, data aggregators, drug and insurance companies, and performance measurement subcontractors, as insurers and pharmacies automated their practices to meet more complex billing requirements while leaving doctors with more production line work.
The authors conclude that the solution and production work streams be designed to match worker skills, supported by policies and workflow.
The physician who sent the article my way says that the “workflow versus thoughtflow” challenge requires a major reengineering of physician processes to allow either (a) lower-level staff to do them where appropriate; or (b) the physician to perform them while still addressing higher-level thinking tasks.
Webinars
July 12 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Digital Data Stewardship for Trusted, High-Quality Data Exchange.” Sponsor: Clinical Architecture. Presenter: Carol Graham, MS, RN, product manager, Clinical Architecture. Organizations face challenges in ensuring that the patient data they received and send is consistent, accurate, and usable. Use cases include receiving multi-source data across health information networks with variation in formats and content; merging and de-duplicating provider, payer, and research data; uplifting legacy data for current use cases and formats; and normalizing and formatting data for public health surveillance, quality measure reporting, and providing directly to the patient. This webinar will cover Pivot, a comprehensive Digital Data Steward solution that orchestrates format harmonization, content (vocabulary) normalization, de-duplication, and data quality validation into a single solution.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Patient engagement and release-of-information technology vendor HealthMark Group acquires Acton Corporation, its third ROI acquisition in 15 months.
Sales
- In England, East Suffolk and North Essex and West Suffolk trusts choose Sectra for digital pathology.
- NHS Scotland names Citadel Health as supplier of its Laboratory Information Management System framework.
People
Kyruus hires Paul Merrild MBA (Sound Physicians) to the newly created position of president.
CloudWave promotes Mike Donahue to VP of client services.
Former Kareo CEO Dan Rodrigues takes the CEO role at Tebra, the company he co-founded when Kareo merged with PatientPop last year.
Privacy and Security
Baton Rouge General is forced to chart on paper due to a Tuesday cyberattack.
Other
Funniest news of the week: the federal government fines accounting firm Ernst & Young $100 million for failing to act on reports that many of its employees were cheating on their CPA exams. The best part – the section they were cheating on was ethics. Those involved say they were short on after-work study time or had already failed the exam multiple times.
Sponsor Updates
- California State University, Dominguez Hills becomes the seventh higher education institution to join Optimum Healthcare IT’s CareerPath program, which offers students who are interested in a healthcare IT career a two-phase training program that includes a digital health certification program that was co-developed with CHIME followed by application-specific technical tracks.
- Visage Imaging joins the Amazon Web Services Partner Network as an Advanced Technology Partner.
- Premier honors The Breakaway, an Indiana recovery home for women battling addiction, with its Monroe E. Trout Premier Cares Award and a $100,000 prize.
- West Monroe publishes a new report, “Understanding Major Trends in Healthcare M&A and Investment.”
- The HIT Like a Girl Podcast features EVisit Chief Strategy Officer Juli Stover.
- FDB hires Jaelyn Ibarra as a research associate.
- GHX congratulates customer Spectrum Health on earning the 2022 Top Supply Chain Projects Award from Supply & Demand Chain Executive.
Blog Posts
- Strengthening HCP Engagement with Omnichannel Strategies (OptimizeRx)
- Brand Loyalty: How to Reach New Patients and Keep Them Coming Back (Symplr)
- HL7 FHIR DevDays top 5 takeaways (Redox)
- Arrive Health Helps Doctors Cut Prescription Costs for Patients (Arrive Health)
- The Art of a Data Detective (Surescripts)
- What’s the Difference Between Omnichannel and Multichannel Customer Support? (Talkdesk)
- Embracing Modern Clinical Communication and Collaboration Methods (TigerConnect)
- How Managing Chronic Conditions is Streamlined with Digital Technology (Twistle)
- Breaking Down the 2021 MIPS Preliminary Feedback Fact Sheet (WebPT)
- A Different Point of View: Solving the ‘Inter (without) Operability’ Conundrum (Medicomp Systems)
- FHIR Dev Days – What a Difference Three Years Makes! (Diameter Health)
- Visuals in Health Education: The Positive Impact is Easy to See (Healthwise)
- SHIELD: Overcoming obstacles to lab information interoperability (Intelligent Medical Objects)
- Providers are Onboard with Online Scheduling: What Healthcare Organizations Should Do Now. (Kyruus)
- H is for ‘Empathy’ (Lyniate)
- For Rural Hospitals, It Pays to Be Transparent (Medhost)
- How clinicians can use AI to improve patient care (Meditech)
- From Data to Actionable Insights: Create a Data-Driven SNF Rehab Therapy Team (Net Health)
- Bridging the Gap in Primary Care: Behavioral Health Integration Best Practices (Neuroflow)
- Bringing Equity to the Forefront with CalAIM (Netsmart)
- Revenue cycle transformation: 3.4% increase in net revenue and still growing (Nordic)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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In the NEJM piece that you pointed out, I wonder how you see the impacts of hospital-employed physicians, use of hospitalists in acute settings, and protocol-based treatment plans have on the production line/solution shop spectrum.
Re: NEJM Article “The Solution Shop and the Production Line…”
I totally agree that there can be a bias towards care activities that are conducive to measurement. One of my favorite thinkers on this subject is named Brian Livingston, who is an IT executive and not clinical. He says (paraphrased of course):
1). For every function, there is a metric that is easy, attractive, and wrong;
2). Be wary of what you measure. All measurement carries an powerful implied mandate to “improve”, and thus that metric will be made to move. Regardless of the business implications of moving the metric;
3). Wise/sound metrics are more difficult to achieve, but they are worth the effort.