Technology

I wrote previously on disaster recovery planning for the medical office (and we have an audio teleseminar coming out in the near future on just this subject). If you connect to your office from home, it’s a good idea to have a disaster recovery plan in place for your home office as well. I had a chance to personally put a plan into effect when my house was struck by lightning - for the second time in three years.

Well, it wasn’t actually a direct hit. I was awakened early one morning last week by what sounded like a mortar going off in the back yard. There was no loss of power but several electronic devices were affected: a wireless router, two switches, a satellite receiver, a digital phone, the alarm system and, oh, yes, my desktop computer. (more…)

An article posted on ZD Net discusses a new online service that helps patients avoid being “non-adherent”, i.e. to take their meds. The American economy loses $177-300 billion per year because people don’t take their medicine properly.

Sean Teare is president of InnovationRx, a Massachusetts-based unit of a British company which aims both to cut the cost of nagging people to take their meds and improve the rate at which they do.

Will this new service work?

As to their business model, “We’re a subset of disease management. If you don’t improve adherence you can lose the impact of other changes. Health plans are looking for short term ROI, and we can show that.”

Shopping for network hardware can be like shopping for a used car in a foreign country. There a lot of decisions to be made and one of the toughest is choosing a brand. The natural instinct is to shop for the lowest price, and although price is a very important factor, others play a big role in the decision making process.

Choosing a Hardware Vendor

Most large vendors negotiate pricing based not only on what you are immediately purchasing but also what you anticipate purchasing in the future, so it’s important to communicate your long term order goals. Often, you can achieve better pricing on a purchase today if your vendor can count on your purchase tomorrow as well.

Repair service and warranty options are critical with network hardware. Make sure you understand
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When I first joined our group about 11 years ago (jeez, it’s been almost 12 years!) we had some 80 or so employees and a big collection of PC computers connected in a patchwork of a network - not exactly state-of-the-art. Our phone system, however, was relatively sophisticated - or so we thought. A multi-line phone system with several custom features and a message-on-hold device. What we didn’t realize until much later was that we were paying for each and every line coming into the building as well as for each and every custom feature on each and every one of those individual phone lines.

Another drawback to this type of system is that the staff needs to keep track of multiple phone numbers - this can get chaotic when you start adding multiple locations. If you needed to get hold of a particular doctor, for example, first you would need to find out where he or she is (more…)

A frequent discussion among colleagues, especially if they are in the same group, is whether or not a practice will ever realize a return on their investment in an EMR system. Of course, this is beside the point that the government is mandating the use of EMR by within the next ten years. While hospitals and larger clinics have already done the number crunching, and believe that EMR systems will more than pay for themselves, it may be more difficult for the average-sized practice to calculate their savings.

Nevertheless, an article on Software Advice offers some more reasons to consider making the switch to paperless, including

1. Savings on chart pulling costs. Several studies have calculated that it can cost as much as $4 to pull or create a paper chart. Beth Israel Hospital in (more…)

So, you’ve now made the decision to get your office running on an electronic medical records (EMR) system and you’ve chosen the specific software you want. Before you start making any major software or hardware purchases, however, you should have someone help you implement EMR into your practice - an IT (information technology) consultant or firm.

While a larger practice may have the resources for full-time IT personnel, what is a smaller group or solo practice to do?

IT is not just one narrow field, but many categories rolled into one, just as medicine comprises many distinct specialties. So, you may require different IT services depending on your practice’s needs.

But first, there are some things you need to consider before hiring your potential IT consultant or firm: (more…)

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…)

Even if you haven’t yet made the leap to full electronic medical records (EMR) implementation, chances are you’re already using a computerized system for scheduling, billing, or other administrative functions. And unless you only have one computer in the office, it’s likely that the computers are connected by some sort of network.

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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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