Guest Article: Creating a Culture of Adoption for EHRs and Health IT

It is general knowledge among seasoned EHR implementers that EHR technology is not the primary concern when promoting EHR adoption (while there are many areas of potential improvements, the tech is generally “good enough” in most cases). There are, however, many challenges surrounding the deployments EHRs and one of the biggest is that not enough training or pre work done to prepare staff and resources. A great way to ensure EHR success is by creating a “Culture of Adoption,” which is something I discussed at length with my friend John Lynn after he attended a recent “think tank” style event hosted at TEDMED by the Breakaway Group (a Xerox Company).

These days I’ve been getting an increasing number of questions from some very smart readers of this blog about whether or not graduate degrees or technical (HIT-specific or otherwise) certifications are worth the effort. I’ve written a few posts recently on similar topics and those are worth reviewing: Check out these videos if you’re looking for healthcare IT jobs The realities of getting a job in healthcare IT How to get a job in healthcare IT when you don’t have specific experience My view on HIT (or other technical) certifications The last post in the list above goes into specific detail about what I think about certifications but I didn’t talk much about graduate degrees so I’ll elaborate a bit more on that here.

I recently posted about my upcoming Healthcare Unbound presentation on why healthcare disruption is happening too slowly and requested some thoughts from my readers. This morning I woke up to receive these terrific remarks from Jeroen Bouwens which I’m sharing with permission: My theory as to what is holding back certain types of innovation in healthcare is the idea of distributing liability. As long as the ultimate responsibility, and therefore liability, lies with the Medical practitioner, they are extremely reluctant to accept automated systems making medical decisions.

I had the privilege of working with Dr. Peter Levin as an outside technology strategy adviser while he was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Veterans Affairs during the first Obama Administration. Peter’s a hard-charging, fast-moving, take-no-prisoners style senior technical executive; he was an entrepreneur, professor, and engineer long before he came into government so it was no surprise that he was able to accomplish a great deal during his tenure as the CTO of VA.

I first started using and mentoring developers on agile software development techniques like eXtreme Programming (XP) and Scrum over a decade ago. Often called “lightweight” methodologies, agile software development lifecycles have been generally misunderstood as lacking enough rigor and sophistication to be used in safety-critical systems. Many have erroneously assumed that Agile, Scrum, and related methodologies can’t really be implemented in risk-focused “important” industries like medical devices because they believe only classic waterfall will be accepted by the FDA.

I’ve been invited to give a keynote talk at the Tenth Annual Healthcare Unbound Conference taking place in Denver on July 11-12. Healthcare Unbound is the “granddaddy” of recent Health 2.0, Connected Health, and similar Health Tech conferences. What I love about this specific conference, which I’ve only spoken a few times, is that for a decade now it’s focused on patient engagement, consumer-centric health, and connected health well before it was sexy and fashionable.

_I’m a geek and proud of it — I love building software, launching new products, and am a fan of others that do it well. Recently I ran across the Berlin-based team from kenHub, a site focused on teaching anatomy online and helping medical students prepare for tests. I reached out to the team to ask them how they were differentiating themselves from the many other solutions available they said their goal was to simplify the process of learning using new didactic concepts to focus on memorizing and gamification elements to make it fun and engaging.

A frequent question I am asked by startups and their software focused leadership teams is, “how do we generate sales and what is the appropriate process to follow in creating our sales expectations.” My friend Steve Carbonara has been selling software to healthcare enterprises for years so I asked him to write a companion to his piece on_ __selling to hospitals. Steve is currently the Chief Sales Officer at Cohealo, Inc.

Digital Patient Engagement (DPE) is a subject that’s been getting a great deal of attention these days, notably because MU Stage 2 specifically mentions DPE as a requirement for the next generation of certified EHRs. Personally I believe Patient Engagement is still confusing to most people and is probably in the Peak of Inflated Expectations phase of the Gartner hype cycle (another way to think about it is that the DPE noise level is probably much higher than useful signals coming out of the industry).

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