Patient referral leakage: Are health systems making it easy to do the right thing?
I recently spoke with a colleague about a large hospital client which is examining how they can reduce their patient referral leakage. By referral leakage, I mean patients who get primary or emergency care from a doctor at one health system who then seek specialty outpatient care from a clinician at a different health system. […]
Essential ephemera: The sad, over-too-quickly life of a wearable datum
A few months ago, I wrote about “homeless data.” I posited that as we continue to generate information about ourselves, we’ll quickly fill up electronic health records (EHRs) with petabytes of data, but precious little knowledge. Some obvious sources of this voluminous information are genomic data that are newly available from your friendly corner laboratory […]
De-implementation: “Just say no” isn’t enough
User-centered system design can help save lives
In my previous blog post, I wrote about the Nashville, TN nurse RaDonda Vaught who was convicted last month of criminally negligent homicide and abuse of an impaired adult after a medication error contributed to the death of a patient in 2017. In it, I described some of the circumstances leading up to the death […]
It takes a system to keep us safe
Last month, a jury convicted Nashville, TN nurse RaDonda Vaught of criminally negligent homicide and abuse of an impaired adult after a medication error contributed to the death of a patient in 2017. Nurse Vaught was not accused of ill will or malevolent intent toward 75-year-old Charlene Murphey. However, the jury found that she was […]
The value of data infrastructure modernization for the health system [Podcast]
In this podcast, Nordic’s Director of Performance Improvement Kelly Krulisky sat down with Nordic’s Managing Director of Digital Health Kevin Erdal and Chief Medical Officer Craig Joseph, along with Emory Healthcare’s Corporate Director Matt Robuck and Texas Children’s Hospital’s VP of IT John Hamm, to discuss the positive effects a new data strategy can have […]
“Clickbusters” can bust more than clicks
I was fascinated by a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) titled “Clinician collaboration to improve clinical decision support: the Clickbusters initiative.” The paper describes how a group of clinicians, informaticians, and researchers from Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) developed and executed a design to “improve safety and quality […]
Guidelines will rule the world
Everyone knows medicine is an art not a science. Sure, fine, perhaps everyone doesn’t know this, but it’s an accepted fact. Ok, maybe it’s not a fact, per se, but lots of people think it, so its veracity should not be questioned. Geez, people, here’s my final statement: some people sometimes say that medicine is […]
Houston, we have a data problem
Last year, Nordic’s CEO Jim Costanzo wrote about “healthier data, healthier people.” He noted that our electronic health records (EHRs) are missing essential information about what’s going on between infrequent visits to the clinic or emergency department, and he wrote about how this lack of data negatively affects patients. But it’s not just too little […]
Tired: Help desk. Wired: How desk!
