Administration

After designing the physical layout of your office network, it’s time to start making some decisions about its logical design. The logical design is basically the network’s intangible structure and function. In this month’s article, I’ll provide some guidelines on creating an efficient, flexible and smoothly functioning logical network.

Strive for Flexibility

A good rule of thumb to use when designing is to organize and group by function, and then by geography. This design provides greater flexibility for function and management of your network. For example, if your organization has three locations, it’s desirable to create a logical unit named “Front Desk.” (more…)

Should your practice outsource IT (information technology) or hire your own in-house computer specialist? Whether you decide to implement an electronic medical records system now or five years down the road, the movement towards a practice management approach that makes more use of advanced technologies is already underway. At root, the practice of medicine is a business like any other, and today’s physicians must be prepared to embrace state-of-the-art tools or face the possibility of being edged out by more tech-savvy competitors.

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The path to wide-scale EHR implementation is still barred by many obstacles.A decade ago, most medical practice managers believed that the shift toward the total digitization of medical information was inevitable. In reality, however, the transition from dead trees to bytes has proven to be a bit more complex than expected.

InformationWeek’s recent take on the slow march toward universal EHR implementation insightfully points out some of the chief obstacles that have hindered and delayed the transition process.

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Getting staff on board may be the most challenging part of technology change, but change management principles can help counter resistance.Electronic medical records systems are designed to make practice management easier. By automating, streamlining, and centralizing many of the dozens of administrative tasks staff members must attend to on a daily basis, an EMR system can significantly enhance your staff’s efficiency, freeing them up to focus their efforts on more critical matters.

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Before you let an employee go, ask yourself these important questions: Why is my employee not working up to standard? What can I do to help him? Ever ask yourself those questions? Well, if you’d like to know the answers – read on. You see, it all boils down to asking 3 simple questions, and depending on the answers, you’ll know what to do.

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At a recent meeting of larger medical practices, an issue which comes up frequently is the challenge of recruiting a new partner. And time and time again, a recurring theme is one of differences between generations of physicians.

Those physicians with retirement on the horizon looked at their medical careers as the most important part of their lives - but also looked at new partners coming in as a source of their retirement, with expensive buy-ins and goodwill payments to boot.

The next generation, those physicians in their ‘prime’, have a similar work ethic, but are a little more pragmatic about their careers - there is no golden retirement and there is an expectation that one will have to work harder and harder to keep one’s head above water. As far as relying on new blood for retirement; well, there is little expectation of that. They are satisfied in merely finding new physicians willing to work harder who also want to become equity partners.

And this brings us to the new generation, which recent surveys have described as wanting to work less even if this means not becoming equity partners in a practice and remaining as employees for the long haul. They are more likely to be married to another professional with neither being considered the primary breadwinner and finding satisfaction less in work than in family and lifestyle.

Look in our articles section to come for more in-depth discussion from physicians, managers and experts in the industry on this important and challenging issue.

Microsoft’s HealthVault hopes to bring EMRs to consumersYou can always tell when a particular industry is getting hot: when big tech players start jockeying for position. Microsoft, AOL, and Google are all announcing different electronic medical records initiatives.

Microsoft has unveiled what it calls HealthVault , a sort of personal filing cabinet for storing important medical information on yourself and your family. It allows the consumer to give access to physicians or hospitals. It also includes HealthVault Search, a health search tool designed to work with the platform. Accessible on the HealthVault Web site, this search engine promises to “intuitively [organize] the most relevant online health content, allowing people to refine searches faster and with more accuracy, and eventually connect them with HealthVault-compatible solutions.”

This latter feature. or dream, to be able to connect to other compatible solutions, is part of the eventual goal of a nationalized electronic health record repository. Is this a new idea? No. It has been tried before with limited success. But now that some big players are jumping into the fray, we may see some momentum.

Still, there are some unanswered questions. HealthVault, for example, does not need to be HIPAA-compliant because patients are granting access to whomever they choose. How this would mesh with true electronic medical records, which must be HIPAA-compliant, remains to be seen. There are also concerns about security - who actually owns the information and what happens if there is a security breach?

With less than 15% of medical practices using true EMR systems, consumers may end up beating doctors to the punch.