Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 10/16/23

Generative AI continues to be a hot topic around the virtual physician water cooler. My colleagues have come to expect me to have my finger on the pulse of innovation, even though interacting with these solutions is a small part of my current work in clinical informatics.

OpenAI recently announced that “ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak,” heralding an opportunity for a “more intuitive type of interface” that allows the user “to have a voice conversation or show ChatGPT what you’re talking about.” The blog details the potential of the technology to impact daily life.

As an aspiring amateur chef, I’m intrigued about the potential to “snap pictures of your fridge and pantry to figure out what’s for dinner (and ask follow up questions for a step by step recipe).” At any given time, my kitchen has a stack of recipes that I find intriguing. It would be great if artificial intelligence could parse them and determine which ones I might be more likely to make, and what ingredients I need to make their creation a reality.

Plus and Enterprise users get first crack at the new features, with voice coming on mobile platforms and images being available on all platforms. As for voice, the goal is for users to be able to have a conversation with the virtual assistant after choosing one of five voice options.

As an early adopter of the Garmin Nuvi back in the dark ages before Google Maps, I miss my former trusty companion “Ken the Aussie” and was hoping that there would be a similarly engaging option available with the new solution, especially since the company states they worked with professional voice actors to create the options. Alas, I didn’t find an internationally-accented voice – the options are named Juniper, Sky, Cove, Ember, and Breeze.

I can’t wait to explore the image options. One of the use cases that OpenAI lists includes “analyze a complex graph for work-related data.” I have some absolutely crazy pictures of whiteboard drawings that I’ve collected over the years and can’t wait to unleash AI technology on those and see what sense it can make of them, if any. New York Times reporter Kevin Roose got a sneak peek at a beta version of the technology recently and shared his results. He noted some issues:

• Taking a picture of the front page of the newspaper, he asked ChatGPT to summarize it. The AI hallucinated, “inventing a statistic about fentanyl-related deaths that wasn’t in the original article.”
• The technology “flopped” when asked to assist with a crossword puzzle.
• It referred to a stuffed dinosaur as a whale.

It was also unable to assist with deciphering a diagram for assembling a piece of IKEA-esque furniture, although I’m less surprised by that than the other issues mentioned. He also noted limitations in how the technology processes images of human faces, although he mentions this is functioning as designed. Developers wanted to avoid it being used for facial recognition or critiquing people’s appearance. As someone who has cared for teens who have been cyberbullied, I’m grateful for the latter.

The New York Times reporter found the voice capabilities to be particularly powerful, referring to it as “Siri on steroids” with a “fluid and natural” voice that has “slight variations in tone and cadence that make it feel less robotic.” He notes that his request to hear the story of the Three Little Pigs “in the character of a total frat bro” was “a sleeper hit.” (The example is available in the article, if you’d like to give it a listen – I agree it was pretty funny.)

Honestly, I can’t wait to ask it to tell me a story about healthcare IT from the perspectives of some of the archetypal personas we see in the industry: the exuberant CEO, the frustrated project manager, the surly end user, and the burned-out clinician. It would probably be more entertaining than some of the talks we saw at conferences like HLTH, hands down.

Earlier in the month, OpenAI had also announced that its Dall-E image generator was being incorporated into ChatGPT. When AI-generated images first came on the scene, there were a lot of concerns about copyright issues, competition with human artists, and the role of AI in the creative process. Now that the technology is becoming more accessible, some of my physician colleagues have also been concerned about the potential for using generative AI to create images that can be passed off as medical records in order to manipulate a physician into providing treatments or medications for which a patient might otherwise be inappropriate.

There was a big discussion among our group about the potential for diversion of controlled substances if patients presented with AI-generated x-rays, CTs scans, or MRIs. I’m seeing an increasing number of physicians paying attention to political happenings, so of course there was concern with the potential to use AI to manipulate upcoming elections. Of course, there are plenty of bad human actors that already have the technology to do those sorts of things, but somehow things just seem scarier to some when automation is involved.

OpenAI isn’t the only company that’s doubling down on chatbot investments. Google recently released improvements that allow Bard to access information from Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Drive accounts through a feature called Bard Extensions. It can also draw from YouTube and Google maps for information. Although those enhancements potentially represent a substantial increase in generative power for sophisticated applications, I’m more interested in straightforward but potentially complex tasks, like helping me parse through the hundreds of emails I receive each day across both my personal and HIStalk accounts and helping me identify which ones might be most intriguing.

Given my consulting work helping organizations streamline their meeting calendars, I’d also love to unleash a chatbot to parse calendar data to help me figure out which meetings should be moved to maximize attendance, which should be kept where they are, and which might be able to be eliminated. Of course, most of the organizations I work with are still devotees of Office 365, so Bard isn’t going to be much help there.

What do you see as the areas with the greatest potential for generative AI, and what do you see as the biggest potential pitfalls? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 10/12/23

The theme of this week’s edition of “Where in the world is Dr. Jayne” seems to involve cities that have either “falls” or “rapids” in the name. We just left the fifth iteration, and I have to say each one has been inspirational in its own way. 

This particular example was flanked by a historic site commemorating a failed business venture that attempted to harness the power of the falls. The owners would control the volume of the pool upstream and unleash it when there were wealthy investors visiting, making the falls seem as if they could generate more power than was realistic.

Reading that plaque instantly reminded me of some of the things I see day in and day out in healthcare IT. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what’s real code and what’s vaporware because the demos are extremely slick. Of course, those of us who have been in the trenches for a while know that everything is always cooler before you actually buy it, but it was interesting to be reminded that companies have been overstating their potential as long as there have been commercial endeavors.

HIMSS registration is open. This year, I’m branching out to a different hotel. It’s right next door to the place I usually stay, so I won’t be hiking longer to the convention center, but I’m hopeful that it will be better maintained than my old standby was the last time I stayed there.

I was hoping that the new management would innovate on conference pricing, but they’ve kept the tiered pricing structure that makes me feel like I’m being nickel and dimed. A Basic Conference Pass is $945 and includes the opening reception, exhibit hall, education sessions, and “select networking events.” You have to spend an additional $300 to get the Conference Plus Pass, which includes the mentioned items plus the post-conference recordings.

I always appreciated those when they used to be part of the base package since it’s impossible to cover the entire exhibit hall for HIStalk and make it to a decent number of sessions. Not to mention that it always seems like there are two sessions I want to attend at the same time, so that was nice. The pricier pass also includes a pre-conference forum and the Thursday night special event. For an additional $90, you can get the Provider Executive Pass, which includes access to the CXO Experience and an Executive Summit. It looks like the session recordings can be added on for the bargain price of $199. The Thursday night event is available a la carte for $85, but no details about the event are available yet.

I went through the process and noticed some subtle changes to the registration process. Depending on what I listed as my “Worksite,” I saw different options for the passes that were available to me, including a disclaimer on the Provider Executive Pass that said it was “subject to HIMSS approval.” I was also asked if I’d like to participate in the new Hosted Buyer program, which provides two nights of hotel accommodation and travel expense reimbursement in exchange for two hours of time meeting with qualified exhibitors. I was asked to “provide up to 2 goals/objective you have for HIMSS24” and of course the first things that came to mind after “avoid the Florida humidity” were snarky, including “find a coffee line that’s less than 30 minutes long” and “exhibit hall booth crawl with Matthew Holt.” The latter has a greater chance of happening than the former, but we’ll have to see what wishes the HIMSS conference fairies grant me in 2024.

During some downtime during my travels, I went hiking with an old friend who also does information technology work. Her organization is open to the public several days per week and sits in the social services realm, so employees tend to be more office based, although they allowed some employees to work remotely at least part time during the pandemic, particularly on the days when the office wasn’t open to the community. In an effort to double down on culture building, they decided to use one of those non-client-facing days to conduct an all day team-building event.

I have to say, her recounting of the day puts some of the “forced fun” events I’ve heard of into perspective. First, management advertised a “secret breakfast location,” where they would ask people to leave their cars for the day. My friend drives a classic convertible that is in the process of restoration and probably shouldn’t sit out uncovered all day, so she asked if she could have the address in advance to drive by and make sure it would be OK, and was told no. Of course, nothing says respect like not trusting an employee to keep a location confidential while making sure their needs are met.

After breakfast, a bus was to pick the group up and take them to their next location. The “limo bus” that arrived was complete with LED lighting and a bejeweled pole dancing apparatus, which left many of the mostly conservative employees dumbfounded. Employees were driven on that ultimate party bus to the local Walmart, where they were given $20 and 20 minutes to scour the store with a buddy and buy something with the caveat that it “can’t be anything you really need” and that they would have to show it to everyone later and explain why they bought it.

My friend thought that was an odd task as there were several things she would have preferred to spend the unexpected money on but didn’t want to have to explain her purchases to the group. At first, I wasn’t totally understanding the assignment as I thought it was to spend money for something for a donation item to a good cause or something similar, but as she clarified the process it seemed even weirder. Ultimately she ended up with a denim jacket since that would fit the assignment, but she admitted to me that she’d likely take it back and spend the money on what she needed in the first place.

From there it was back on the party bus, with other activities that she felt weren’t that productive as far as bringing the team together or helping them get to know one another. She described the pace as frantic and rushed and said they didn’t feel they had enough time to complete what they were being asked to do, and it was just stressing people out. Towards the end of the day, management asked the team to complete survey cards, collecting them in a hat. They then asked participants to draw a random card out of the hat and read it to the group, and I bet they were surprised when comments such as “exhausting” or “total waste of time” or “we have a pole, where’s the dancer” were read aloud.

My friend is betting they might have a different strategy as they plan for next year’s team-building event, but personally I can’t wait to hear what they come up with. Team-building is a tricky business. Done well, it can create new relationships and strengthen existing ones. Done badly, it can highlight how disconnected leadership is from the team.

Speaking of disconnects, one of the side topics around the virtual water cooler this week was the idea of hospitals and health systems purchasing naming rights for stadiums and other public venues. Although the physicians in the discussion see the value of naming as a marketing tool, they questioned how organizations can spend millions of dollars on those opportunities when they can’t find money to retain nursing staff, recruit scarce subspecialty clinicians, or manage medical debt and collections policies in a patient-centric manner.

I wondered how pervasive this issue is and did a quick tour through a Wikipedia listing of sponsored sports venues in the US. I found 23 instances of the word “health” appearing in those names, including AdventHealth, Atrium Health, Dignity Health, Mayo Clinic Health System, Mercy Health, Sutter Health, and UC Health. Comparing the US to other primarily English-speaking developed nations , there were no examples of the word “health” or “hospital” in the listings from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or the United Kingdom.

Does your health system employer have naming rights or sponsorships in the community? Does it contribute to better patient care or is it a distraction? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 10/9/23

Hitting the road over the last couple of weeks, I had to really strip down the essentials of what I needed to get my work done. It’s definitely a shocker to go from having either multiple monitors or one ridiculously large monitor to a single laptop screen. I know there are portable second monitor setups out there, but I wanted to see if I could manage the laptop life for more than the week that I usually travel at a time.

My travel companion is in the process of relocating, so I was a bit limited on the overall space in the car due to the household goods crammed into every square inch. I’m the kind of person who has lived in a tent for the better part of a month, so I figured I could find a way to make it work.

It got me thinking about the things I use every day in my home office and how that setup compares to when I used to work in a corporate office and when I go on site for consulting engagements. The home office is always my first choice because it has exactly what I need and I can leave out the things I use often and store the things that are more occasional-use items. The corporate office was similar, although I didn’t have anything on my desk that I’d be sad about in the event it disappeared. We had a standard set of corporate-issued supplies, like a stapler, three-hole punch, and tape dispenser that I don’t really remember using since the whole point of our project was to be paperless. I had an inordinate number of push pins, though, since our cube walls were secretly fabric-covered bulletin boards and I certainly took advantage of that as a way to hang pictures, flyers, and other bits of decoration.

When I travel for consulting engagements, I’ve been fortunate that most of my clients provide nice “hotel” space that includes a multiple monitor setup with docking station and ethernet cable. I had one client whose idea of a productive workspace was an L-shaped bank of bar-height countertops that faced a wall on one side and a set of floor-to-ceiling glass windows on the other. We had to vacate our station at the end of every day, so I ended up carting everything around all the time. If you came in later than others, you were stuck in front of the windows with their never-ending glare.

The stools that they had at these “desks” weren’t exactly the right height, either, and their lack of a footrest meant that your feet ended up dangling. The other option was a cushy armchair with a folding desk on one of the arms that was barely big enough to hold your laptop and definitely wasn’t large enough to accommodate a mouse. In either setup, the idea of a second monitor was a figment of my imagination. I can’t say that I was sad when the engagement ended.

As employers demand that people return to the office, it’s going to be important to create the kind of spaces that make people actually want to come to the office. Will they have a designated space that they will share with one or two other people, or will it be a free-for-all every day to see who works where? Will they have the amenities needed to be productive, such as dual monitors? Will there be company-provided snacks or drinks beyond the stereotypical burned coffee? Many of us have become content in our home office hideaways, and it’s going to take time to reorient us to office rules, such as making sure to take our containers out of the refrigerator before clean-out day and to avoid bringing allergens to the office that might negatively impact our colleagues.

As people go back and forth in a hybrid situation, it will be more important than ever to make sure accounts sync seamlessly between the corporate office and the home office. People also need to figure out what the must-haves are for each office environment and whether they will need to bring things from place to place to feel they have what they need.

I ran across an article recently that talked about dealing with digital clutter, which might be a contributing factor for anxiety and frustration. The author specifically calls out things like photos, old presentations, expense receipts, and other digital artifacts that might be rarely seen but are always present. Then there are the physical objects, including charging cables, old phones, the keyboard that your company shipped to you that you don’t like but will need to possibly return some day, and more.

The author offers some strategies for decluttering. On the topic of power cables, the recommendation is to toss anything that doesn’t have an identified device that it goes with. If there are extra cables, one shouldn’t keep more than two of each version. Further recommendations include discarding anything that hasn’t been used in six months, although we’re reminded to be sure to discard it responsibly. I’m lucky that my city does an electronic recycling event every other month, but not every community is that fortunate.

For cables that are used regularly, the article recommends organizing them as much as possible, including attaching them to desk legs or bundling them for neatness. I’ll admit, I have a pile of twist ties on my desk. I’m always meaning to do some cable management, but I never get around to it. I wonder what that subconsciously indicates about me.

The author goes on to talk about “digital hoarding” and managing obsolete data. They recommend getting rid of files that haven’t been opened in years, purging smartphone apps that aren’t used, and cleaning up photo libraries. Quick decluttering can involve removing duplicates or photos where our technique was less than ideal, or just organizing images into folders. More extensive decluttering involves curation where we determine if particular photos are something we want to see again in the future.

Honestly, if I tried to get into that, I know I’d have an acute case of analysis paralysis, so I’m going to take a pass on that suggestion. It’s definitely easier to clean up data, at least for me. Deciding to purge client files after a certain number of years or months seems cleaner than trying to make a value judgment about whether I think I will want to look at it in the future.

At least for the foreseeable future, I’ve stripped my needs down to what can fit in a business-style backpack and a 40-liter duffel. My traveling companion doesn’t care if I’m wearing the same two pair of Columbia pants all the time, and we are intentionally not going anywhere that requires a fancier level of dress. I’ve got my laptop and a small travel mouse, although I do wish I had brought my full-size one, but I’m sure I’ll eventually get used to the tiny one. I’ve adapted from my ever-present stack of sticky notes and my trusty whiteboard to their digital counterparts, and it was fun to remember that’s how I used to do it back in the day when I traveled every other week, since I had forgotten. Of course, I’ll probably feel different about this when I get back to my bank of monitors, but at least for now it’s fun to rough it a little bit.

What are the office essentials that you absolutely must have, whether at home or in a company facility? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 10/5/23

Registration is open and agendas have been published for the 2023 ONC Annual Meeting, to be held December 14-15 in Washington, DC. Hot topics include artificial intelligence in healthcare, public health standards, policymaking, and of course information blocking. Mainstage sessions will be livestreamed on HealthIT.gov, but breakouts and other sessions will be in-person only.

I’ve never been to an ONC annual meeting, but it looks like there will be some good sessions covering racial bias in health care artificial intelligence. Given the fact that my state recently gave up some federal money because of antiquated public health systems, I’m particularly interested in the Thursday session on “Public Health Data Modernization at the Local, State, and Federal Level.”

The conference is free and the room block rate for hotel accommodation is $188 per night, which isn’t terrible compared to other venues, but be sure to budget an extra $55 per night for parking if you’re driving in. My conference budget this year doesn’t permit me to go, but if anyone wants to send me the scoop from that public health session, I’d be eager to hear what strategies are discussed.

I visited a family member in the hospital recently and took a moment to reflect on how much the technology in the patient rooms has improved since I was a trainee at the same institution. The chart carts and racks have given way to ergonomic workstations in each patient room. The IV pumps have become smarter and more connected, and the in-room patient education is a vast improvement from the crummy printouts we used to give to patients on the day of discharge. It made me think about whether any of our current technologies will still be in service in the future.

I was musing about this with a fellow astronomy and space afficionado, who mentioned an event that took place with the Voyager 2 spacecraft earlier this summer. Apparently it’s still alive and kicking at the tender age of 46 years, although it had gone quiet for a bit. Like parents who have to yell at teenagers from across the house, NASA engineers sent an interstellar “shout” across 12 billion miles of space to get Voyager to turn its antenna back toward Earth. The idea of a piece of equipment from that era still functioning today is pretty impressive. It will be interesting to see which healthcare technologies stand the test of time.

Planning for the American Medical Informatics Association AMIA 2024 Clinical Informatics Conference is underway, and its Scientific Program Committee leadership is seeking interest from those interested in joining the Committee. Members will review submissions and help define the content of the conference. Submissions are being accepted through October 13.

One of the hot topics around the virtual physician water cooler this week was the entry of Costco into the world of telehealth. Essentially, the retail giant is partnering with Sesame to offer discounted virtual primary care and mental health services. Even though I’m not in a traditional primary care practice anymore, I struggle with the transactional nature of some of these offerings, Amazon’s most recent one included. Use of on-demand services like this can fragment care, and I’ve experienced how hard it can be it from the telehealth provider side.

One venture capital leader hit the nail on the head: “From what I can tell, neither Sesame nor Costco have ambitions around a longitudinal relationship with the patient, and definitely no intentions of assuming risk, as it’s a cash pay offering. This is really a story around convenience and incremental growth.” Most patients probably don’t understand this, however. Certainly few of the ones who flocked to the independent urgent care where I worked understood what it means to get care from a third-party provider who doesn’t have access to your records. For the most part, they assumed that all doctors are connected and that I would know everything about them. Magnify that by patients chasing the cheapest visit and moving from provider to provider and it’s going to get messy.

From Off the Grid: “Re: remote work. I enjoyed your recent Curbside Consult on the topic, especially with the true stories from the trenches. I’ve also worked at companies that have handled this well, and also at those who are doing it badly. It seems like a lot of new leaders forget that companies have done this for years and have done it successfully. Check out this article on managing remote teams. I think it has good advice for newbies who are struggling to navigate these waters, which are less uncharted than they think.” The piece has a lot of good advice, including how to make sure that remote teams don’t experience burnout through having regular conversations about how people are doing but “without a string of action items.” It also discusses the need to have clear goals and objectives. I would add that those goals should be set not by management in a top-down fashion, but collaboratively. I still run across leaders that don’t understand how to create reasonable and/or achievable goals, and instead saddle their teams with either shifting targets or ones that simply cannot be accomplished.

I particularly like the article’s advice to “use technology, but wisely,” especially when it discusses communication hierarchies. Some of the most productive teams I have worked with have clear communication matrix documents that explain what should be communicated, by what means, and to whom. This avoids spamming or interrupting people who don’t need to be party to an issue and making sure that items that need attention get the focus they deserve.

My favorite self-organizing team had guidelines around how to communicate based on time sensitivity. For example, anything that needed attention in fewer than three business days required a phone call. Otherwise, an email could be sent, but with the assumption that the recipient had three business days to handle it.

In hindsight, that was luxurious compared to the noisy world of texts, Slack, Teams, various other messenger apps, and general chaos that I live in with my consulting clients. For groups using Slack, Teams, or similar platforms, encourage people to set their status accordingly so people don’t think they’re available when they’re actually busy with someone else and not checking messages. And for those organizations that expect people to be instantly available at all times – good luck, because if you think your teams aren’t using mouse jigglers or other strategies to look active, you’re deluding yourself.

Speaking of remote work, I’m currently on a project that involves mostly heads down work and very few meetings, so I’m taking advantage of the opportunity to do some travel with a friend. For the next few weeks, we’ll be seeing the USA in our Chevrolet, so here’s your “Where in the world is Dr. Jayne?” moment for the week.

What’s the most unusual roadside attraction you’ve visited? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 10/2/23

In my clinical world, I’m starting to see more patients who are struggling with the symptoms of Long COVID. That’s not surprising, since current data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics published a report that indicates that nearly 7% of US adults have experienced the condition.

The data brief from the 2022 National Health Interview Survey indicates that nearly half of those individuals also said they had Long COVID symptoms at the time of the survey. To meet the definition of the condition, patients must have a set of symptoms lasting three months or longer after the initial COVID-19 infection. These can include fatigue, brain fog, dizziness, digestive symptoms, heart palpitations, changes in smell or taste, chronic cough, chest pain, and more.

Many of the patients I see have tried to explain away their symptoms, blaming them on the overall stress of the pandemic, problems with work-life balance, or increased demands from employers due to inadequate staffing. A number of patients also come in with similar clusters of symptoms, but never had a formal diagnosis of COVID, either because they were ill before testing was widely available or were ill later in the course of the pandemic and never tested. Ohers don’t meet the criteria for Long COVID, but are struggling with symptoms like memory issues, insomnia, and fatigue that can be associated with a host of other conditions, including anxiety, depression, and burnout.

Let’s face it, we’ve all been expected to do more with less, and that has ultimately taken a toll. Many healthcare workers, IT folks included, are looking for strategies to make sense of all they’ve been through during the last three years. They’re also looking to find a way forward that doesn’t put them in the office or bringing work home to the detriment of their family time. They’re looking for ways to cope and the mechanisms they employ aren’t always healthy.

While institutions are putting resources behind setting up Long COVID clinics and creating programs to treat those patients, it doesn’t feel like they are setting aside ample resources to deal with COVID’s collateral damage to the broader healthcare world. It’s no surprise that all of us have taken on a substantially larger mental load in recent years, so I set out to find articles that looked at the concept of mental load and mindfulness both before the pandemic and since. How much is this constant need to burn the candle at both ends really impacting us?

The first article I came across was in the New York Times archives from 2016, and caught my eye because of its title: “Think Less, Think Better.” It’s an opinion piece, but references a study that looks at how mental load can negatively impact one’s capacity for original and creative thinking. I’ve certainly experienced that phenomenon, when I’m juggling too many balls or putting out too many fires and as a result tend to fall back on tried-and-true solutions rather than trying to find novel ones.

The author’s research at the time indicated that “innovative thinking, not routine ideation, is our default cognitive mode when our minds are clear.” The study cited in the piece found that “the mind’s natural tendency is to explore and to favor novelty, but when occupied, it looks for the most familiar and inevitably least interesting solution.” Companies that make it a priority for employees to have unstructured time for creative or innovative pursuits seem to have figured this out. Still, there are plenty of companies out there where employees are just marching from meeting to meeting (whether virtually or in person) without time to catch their breath, let alone time to think creatively.

It’s one thing to try to make space for creative thinking when you’re working in the software industry or in marketing or sales, but how does that apply to actually seeing patients or supporting those who do? I wondered how these ideas might be applied to the healthcare IT space. In an August 2023 article in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine (JABFM) titled “Thinking and Practicing Thoughtfully and Thoroughly,” an editor’s note offered examples of some of the challenges of trying to meet the needs of individual patients at individual visits while simultaneously advancing the overall health of the community.

That sounds a lot like what many of us do in healthcare IT, where we try to meet the needs of individual clinicians while balancing them with outcomes desired by the overall technology organization. Like physicians, those of us that work the technology front lines try to find the colleagues who have fallen through the cracks and aren’t getting the support they need, and we also try to fix the overarching structures that might be causing strife. Lobbying an EHR vendor to fix faulty software is a lot more similar to lobbying Congress to fix faulty healthcare policy than I had previously thought.

That particular issue of JABFM offered numerous examples of work being done by physicians to try to improve patient care. I would bet that the majority of the research wouldn’t have been possible without dedicated EHR and analytics teams behind the scenes creating ways to capture the data, extracting it, collaborating with investigators, and more. The examples made me wonder if those who might be far from the front lines think about the impact they’re having with every template build or every SQL query that they do in their daily work, or whether they just think of it as one more thing to check off the ever-growing list of things to be done. Does the data analyst think of how many grandmothers, or sisters, wives, or daughters are in the data set that’s being pulled for breast cancer screening? Do they find a way to make the work feel more valuable, or is it just part of the grind?

In many healthcare delivery organizations, understaffing is present at all levels, at the bedside, in facilities or maintenance, in technology infrastructure, and in the teams trying to pull it all together. When they claim an ever-eroding margin, how can leaders of those organizations try to make space for staffers to not only be mindful about their work, but to have the time to explore their creativity and truly try to innovate? Even if you wanted your staff to spend 10% of their time working on novel ideas, how do you backfill those four hours each week? How do you decide what projects don’t get done when there’s already a backlog? I think the answer in many organizations is to just keep pushing ahead and not look for creative solutions, which ultimately will likely deliver the same results as we’ve been seeing all along because we’re doing what we did all along.

I’d be interested in hearing from readers how their organizations are tackling these phenomena. Are leaders able to make space for thoughtful, meaningful work, or is everyone just back at it, possibly working harder than they did a few years ago? Have people just checked out or left the healthcare space because what we’re asking them to do is untenable? Are your leaders working to find a way forward? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 9/28/23

From Former Cerner: “Re: Oracle CloudWorld meeting. It’s hard to hear about the company’s goal (which is becoming more of a mantra) to ‘drive Cerner profitability to Oracle standards’ when you see what they’re spending money on, including a Formula One race car and of course the racing yacht. When you think about in the context of the fact that they laid off the clinical resources that a lot of us depended on, it’s absolutely nauseating. But I guess it might be a short-lived situation, since all of us are waiting to wind up on a layoff list some time soon.” I have several friends who work for Oracle, and all have shared the same sentiments. In addition, they noted the ongoing global focus (including the CloudWorld Tour 2024, which visits Dubai, London, Milan, and Singapore, among others) as detrimental to understanding the realities of the US healthcare system. Sounds like a lot of people at Oracle are job hunting, and I wish them well as they look for their next adventures.

From Atlanta Express: “Re: updating systems when new vaccines are rolled out. The new COVID vaccines caused havoc with the Vaccines.gov website. What did they think would happen when they authorized a new vaccine on the same day they removed the old vaccine, and removed all the vaccine inventory in the system? Especially when locations don’t have any inventory for the new vaccine? Searching for a ’location near me’ produces zero results. Lots of assumptions were made and now people are surprised, and everybody is scrambling.” I’m not surprised by any government chaos anymore. This seems like a classic cutover-type project, although on a larger scale. We’ve known for weeks that the new vaccines were coming even though we didn’t have a specific data for the Food and Drug Administration and other approvals. Organizations go through a similar process every year with updated influenza vaccines, so it’s disappointing to hear that this was messy. Hopefully, the lessons learned will be well-documented for the next vaccine update, which might be happening every year for the foreseeable future.

There has been a lot of whining by large health systems about the federal requirements for price transparency that were implemented in 2021. Some organizations worked hard to make it difficult for patients to find information where others quietly complied but didn’t promote the availability of data to patients. A recent article posted in JAMA Internal Medicine compared hospital online price calculators with prices obtained via phone for the same services. The authors used vaginal childbirth and brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as their service price points. They concluded that “…at US hospitals, price estimates for shoppable services posted online correlate poorly with prices obtained via phone; these findings suggest that patients will continue to face barriers to comparison shopping.” Only 14% of hospitals had matching prices given via phone and online for childbirth; the figure for brain MRI was 19%. The authors also noted that at up to 12% of hospitals, billing staff couldn’t provide a price estimate even though the hospital had a functional online pricing calculator. Of course, it’s nearly impossible to comparison shop for urgent or emergency services, such as a same-day appendectomy or a critical fracture, so it remains to be seen how useful these price transparency tools are in the long run.

Although many organizations had already embraced electronic health records in the 1990s and early 2000s, it took until the US government’s so-called Meaningful Use program’s inception before other organizations fully embraced the concept. Over time, clinicians and their support teams have been asked to gather increasing amounts of information about their patients with the hope of improving clinical outcomes. First, it was basic medical information such as medications, allergies, and a problem list. Then, we moved on to smoking history, tobacco and drug use, and other factors that are linked to health outcomes. Now, organizations are being asked to collect information across a variety of domains, with social determinants of health receiving much of the current focus.

A recent Viewpoint article in the Journal of the American Medical Association cited the “Inadequacy of Current Screening Measures for Health-Related Social Needs” as something that needs to be addressed. The authors note the presence of new quality standards that are designed to promote health equity in the face of “an indisputable connection between social factors (e.g., low food security, housing instability), structural racism, poverty, and health.” In an unexpected twist, they note that “without additional considerations, these well-intentioned mandates will impede progress in health equity and have the potential to increase long-standing racial and socioeconomic inequities.” They point out that although policymakers use the terms somewhat interchangeably, there is a difference between social risks and social needs. Social risk screening requires validated screening instruments, and social needs screening involves asking the patient about desired assistance. Many health systems have created and employed their own screening instruments without looking at the difference between the two and that approach may lead to paternalistic care as opposed to trying to understand the patient’s perception of their unmet needs.

The authors have some specific recommendations for moving forward with screening in a productive manner, and not surprisingly, those approaches don’t involve standardized pre-visit questionnaires delivered via a patient portal. They recommend that regulatory bodies should provide incentives to health systems to better partner with their patients through a shared decision-making process. This involves cultural understanding and real conversations along with the flow of data among care delivery and social service agencies. They advocate for prioritizing social need screening over social risk screening, focusing on meeting the needs already identified by patients themselves. Staff members need to be trained to do this with empathy rather than just reading a canned questionnaire to patients and capturing their responses.

The authors call for strong social safety nets to better support patients, including nutrition programs and support of policies that promote equity. Unfortunately, in working with large health systems over the better part of two decades, I see a lot of people who still believe it’s easier and better to just throw technology at a problem, and I suspect we’ll be seeing more automated pre-visit questionnaires and fewer direct contact staff members as organizations try to tackle these issues.

How is your organization dealing with social needs data? Is it taking a technology-driven approach or using actual humans to make a difference? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 9/25/23

I’m not sure what the universe is trying to tell me about work life balance and people’s feelings about the return to the office, but my inbox this week was full of articles touching on the topic.

I’ve written in the past about the concept of so-called “quiet quitting,” where employees transition from going the extra mile for their employer to putting in the minimum effort required to meet the job description. The Atlantic took this one step farther with a piece — albeit recycled from 2021, yet presented as if it was something new — titled, “How to Care Less About Work.” Its premise is that workers need to evaluate how they want to spend their remaining time on Earth.

Spoiler alert: many employees agree that the days of working more than 40 hours a week for nebulous corporate goals are over: “It was seldom to create work that was meaningful or innovative, even if we could mumble something to that effect when asked what we like about our job. It wasn’t so that we could someday work less overall. We worked hard to prove that we were alert and available for more work.”

It turns out that The Atlantic piece is actually an excerpt from a book “Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home” by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen. I was intrigued enough to do some weekend reading and found it to be an interesting counterpoint to the numerous CEOs who are clamoring for a return to the office without clear goals for that change. The chapters keep it simple: Flexibility, Culture, Technologies of the Office, and Community. These are all topics that should be critical discussion in any work environment, whether remote, hybrid, or in-office.  I’ve been in several working situations where technology runs rampant and employees are struggling to even do basic tasks due to confusion about the best communication platforms to use for different situations, whether to call, e-mail, message, or text someone, and whether meetings really need to be had.

Like many of us who worked remotely prior to the pandemic, the authors had embraced remote work, moving from Brooklyn to Montana. They discovered it wasn’t as easy as they thought, and that it was important to figure out how to fit work into a rich home life versus always working because if was so easy to just log on without a commute.

As someone who struggled with one particular office-based consulting engagement a few years ago, I loved some of their descriptions: “unscheduled, drive-by meetings” were definitely one of the things I found challenging, especially since I was working from a cubicle on a main aisle in the office and was constantly barraged by people dropping by to say hi or ask questions. I’m always happy to help, but then it takes a few minutes to get back into the groove of the work you were doing, resulting in lower productivity.

There was one particular group manager that I swear never did work. If you popped your head above the partitions, he was always walking around chatting. Another favorite quote: “They [offices] elevate the feeling of productivity over being productive. They’re a breeding ground for microaggressions and toxic loops of hierarchical behavior.” That’s not to say that the latter elements don’t happen in the remote workplace, because I’ve definitely seen them.

The authors challenge companies to reconceptualize the workplace, “having honest conversations about how much people are working and how they think they could work better. Not Longer. Not by taking on more projects, or being better delegators, or having more meetings. Not by creating ‘more value’ for their employer at the expense of their mental and physical health. Instead, it means acknowledging that better work is, in fact, oftentimes less work, over fewer hours, which makes people happier, more creative, more invested in the work they do and the people they do it for.”

I think the idea of really exploring the concept of value is an important one, especially in companies that have a lot of meetings. It’s challenging to understand which meetings provide benefit for attendees and how to find the right balance of scheduled versus nonscheduled time. I worked for one company where its weekly product development meeting was simply an echo chamber for the chief product officer, and no one was allowed to question him. That, my friends, was not a value-added meeting.

Another quote that really resonated with me was around how companies monitor productivity of remote workers. Another part of reconceptualizing the workplace “entails thinking through how online communication tools function as surveillance and incentivize playacting your job instead of actually doing it.” I was at lunch recently with a couple of physician friends, one of whom had recently started working for a large health insurance company doing case reviews in a particular subspecialty where she has many years of experience. She whipped out her laptop and mentioned that although she had already finished her quota of reviews for the day, they went faster than expected, so she needed to log more online time to complete her day. Apparently since she’s new to the company, she’s being treated like a new employee rather than the seasoned reviewer she is, so she has to be sure to log a full eight hours until she reaches the end of her probationary period.

We all agreed that was ridiculous, but humored her in the situation, although it was less funny when her voice-to-text app started picking up our lunch conversation. If there was any AI involved, I hope it enjoyed our entirely too specific discussion of the best way to prepare fried pickles.

This reconceptualization, according to the authors, “will require organization based on employees; and managers’ preferred and most effective work times, and consideration of child-and eldercare responsibilities, volunteering schedules, and time zones.” I worked for a number of years at a large organization that had clients in time zones from Hawaii to London, with the majority of workers being remote. Although customer support teams were organized largely by geography (except for those supporting nationwide clients), we made it clear that we didn’t expect our Pacific time zone friends to be taking calls at 6 a.m. local time or for our Eastern time zone colleagues to still be working at 6 p.m. local time. It took commitment by leaders and team managers to realign meeting schedules into blocks that worked for everyone. We created a culture where it was perfectly fine to have lunch on camera (after all, many of us would regularly have working lunches in the office-based world) as well as to use the extremes of the day to complete personal errands outside of designated blocks where meetings were typically expected. Sure, there were fewer hours in the day which were acceptable for broadly attended meetings, but it caused us to really evaluate whether we really needed to be having so many meetings and how many people really needed to attend them.

The organization was ultimately acquired by another that didn’t share the same values on workday flexibility. The first thing they did was require people who were geographically located near one of the corporate offices, of which there were five at the time, to come into the office two days a week, just to be in the office. It didn’t matter if their teams were there or whether they would spend the whole day on Webex — management wanted to see bodies in chairs when they strolled through.

I immediately lost one of my favorite employees, who had been using her flexible schedule to help care for her husband following a serious illness. She would work from 6 a.m. to noon, take her husband to cardiac rehabilitation, then return after 3 p.m. to finish her day since it was easier to find an in-home caregiver to cover early morning and late afternoon than it was to find one to cover the full day and transport him to therapy. Of course, that meant she couldn’t come into the office two days per week, and the company was unwilling to accommodate her despite the fact that she supported teams that were all across the US and no one she worked directly would have been in the office.

I have so many other stories about what I’ve seen in my consulting travels, and so often when I give examples they fall into the category of “you can’t make this up.” It will be interesting to see what really happens with the remote work landscape over the next two years especially for technology and knowledge workers, like those of us in healthcare IT.

What’s the most egregious thing you’ve seen in a return to office strategy? Is there a way that your organization has done it well? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 9/21/23

I was back in the patient trenches this week, having needed an appointment at a practice where I’m only seen every two or three years. This time around it was less than three, which is the cutoff at which most practices consider you to still be an “established” patient, but they treated me as a new patient nevertheless.

Despite having information in the EHR that they could have printed and asked me to either update or confirm accuracy, they handed me the proverbial clipboard, with six pages of information to read and/or complete. I absolutely hate when medical office forms ask me to write in my insurance member number and group number when they’re right there on the card that the front desk staff just scanned.

I felt validated when a patient who came in shortly after me went back up to the desk and asked if they needed to complete that section, since they had already provided it in the form of the scanned card. I felt a little less validated when the staff responded back by saying yes, they needed it as a “backup to the system,” which could also have been accomplished with a photocopy rather than introduce the potential of a transcription error with a patient copying information from the card.

Across the multiple sheets, I was asked for my primary care physician’s name and phone number two times and was asked for my pharmacy address once and phone number twice. As is common in medical office situations, the documents had been photocopied so many times as to be nearly unreadable in places, which made me want to educate them on the virtues of putting the “master copy, do not use” sticky note on the last sheet in the folder to ensure a clean copy is used for future copies. Alas, I wasn’t there in the role of practice management consultant, so I refrained, although I was sorely tempted.

One of the papers I was asked to complete was essentially the SOAP note (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan for the non-clinical folks) for the office visit, including a request to complete the History of Present Illness, including the prompts that coding specialists look for when assigning billing codes. These prompts hadn’t really been translated to patient-friendly terms, and still read “location, duration, modifying factors, and associated signs/symptoms” much like you’d see in a CMS manual or a medical history-taking textbook.

I gamely played along and admit that I did enjoy the radio station playing in the waiting room, which was FM 106 coming live to us from Dublin, Ireland. I wish they had radio in the exam rooms, because I could hear in great gory detail what was going on in the room adjacent to mine. A medical assistant popped his head in the door (literally halfway in and halfway out) and asked a few more questions, then said the practitioner would be in to see me. She arrived quickly, addressed my problem, and I had no complaints about the clinical care.

Given the paper nature of the office visit thus far, I was surprised to see a link to a patient portal account before I even made it out of the parking lot. I logged on later in the day and was shocked to see the documentation – vital signs were documented including a weight that bore no resemblance to my own, even though no vital signs were taken. Exam elements that weren’t performed were recorded in great detail, alongside the procedure note, which was fortunately accurate as to what actually occurred.

If those exam elements were used to substantiate a higher level of billing, then what we have there is fraud, which is concerning. As a patient, I shouldn’t be placed in the position of having to correct my records, but apparently that’s where I am at the moment. Seems like a call to the office is in order when I get a break in my schedule.

I’m a huge devotee of evidence-based medicine, where we use science and data to help identify the best treatments for our patients. Taking a data-driven approach has also been a big part of my informatics practice, where I look at system utilization and how multiple physicians are using the system before I approve changes that might have only been requested by one user.

In the sprit of evidence-based practice, I was interested to see an announcement by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about the decongestant phenylephrine, which is found in over-the-counter medications including Sudafed PE and some NyQuil products. An FDA advisory panel found unanimously that the ingredient is ineffective, and questions remain whether it will be banned or whether drug companies will be given time to reformulate their products before having to pull drugs containing the ineffective ingredient from the market.

These types of announcements are important for clinical informatics folks, including our colleagues in the pharmacy sphere, as we have to try to find these drugs in order sets and physician favorites lists and send out bulletins to let people know of the announcement if they’re a frequent user of the drug.

The change in this drug’s status is also important for those of us who have followed the methamphetamine crisis in the US, which forced pseudoephedrine behind the counter and led to increased use of phenylephrine as an alternative. It’s the law of unintended consequences, with patients caught in the middle as they try to self-treat minor illnesses. (It should also be noted that the rise in phenylephrine use was also due to another decongestant, phenylpropanolamine, being pulled from the market in part due to an elevated risk of stroke with use.) The reality is that we haven’t seen much action in the development of new drugs like these in recent years and millions of doses of a drug that isn’t much better than placebo have been used by patients generating well over a billion dollars in sales. Here’s to all the informatics folks who will be hunting down this drug in the coming weeks to months.

This week was Telehealth Awareness Week, as decreed by the American Telemedicine Association. There has been a lot of buzz about it online and plenty of people saying how much they think telehealth is improving the healthcare ecosystem, but there are still some downsides to the modality. Healthcare organizations that aren’t embracing it may unwittingly encourage their patients to have more fragmented care as they seek visits with third parties that aren’t considering the patient’s existing records or sharing back to the patient’s medical homes. Other healthcare organizations are frankly encouraging that fragmentation through third-party contracts. A fraction has found a way to make it work, either by building their own telehealth workforce or by using integrated third parties, but they’re in the minority from what I see. On the telehealth platform where I practice as a physician, I have zero access to patients’ records and it makes delivering good care much more difficult than it needs to be.

So many of my colleagues are hyper focused on research in the realm of artificial intelligence that they might be missing out on other interesting topics. I was absolutely blown away by this article in Plos Biology that looked at how music can be reconstructed from brain activity in the auditory cortex. The article’s opening line “Music is core to human experience, yet the precise neural dynamics underlying music perception remain unknown” is a powerful one. In addition to not fully understanding perception, we also don’t understand what makes one person love a particular piece of music and another perceive it like the proverbial nails on a chalkboard. The authors worked with data from 29 patients who listened to a Pink Floyd song, ultimately reconstructing something recognizable out of the neural recordings. Music perception was more dominant in the right brain and researchers localized a particular part of the brain to perceive rhythm.

The authors noted that their findings show the possibility of “paving the way for adding musical elements to brain-computer interface (BCI) applications.” I was talking to a young colleague about this, and he profoundly stated, “Because if you’re going to do trippy mind control research, Pink Floyd is the way to go.” In case you’re wondering, the specific song used in the research was “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1” which was cited as constituting “a rich and complex auditory stimulus.” Don’t worry about volunteering to be a research subject in this area soon, since the participants all had surgically implanted electrodes due to a diagnosis of drug-resistant epilepsy.

If you could only listen to one album for the rest of your life, what would it be? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 9/18/23

Over the years, I’ve been on a number of panels and attended several forums to discuss the participation of women in clinical informatics. One of the most memorable ones was last spring as part of the CHIME track during ViVE, when the CHIME League of Women presented “Mentorship in Action.” We had a chance to understand how mentor/mentee pairs have been instrumental in boosting the presence of women in healthcare IT.

Just anecdotally, when I look at the composition of leadership teams in non-healthcare IT organizations, it seems like there are more women than I see in my own field, but I don’t have any data to back up that sentiment.

A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association titled “Accomplished women leaders in informatics: insights about successful careers” looked at some of the challenges faced by women in the field. Although the study had a relatively small sample size of 16, they looked at women in both academia and industry.

I wasn’t at all surprised when I read the findings: “We conducted a thematic analysis revealing: (1) careers in informatics are serendipitous and nurtured by supportive communities, (2) challenges in leadership were profoundly related to gender issues, (3) ‘Big wins’ in informatics careers were about making a difference, and (4) women leaders highlighted resilience, excellence, and personal authenticity as important for future women leaders.”

The authors also noted that “Sexism is undeniably present, although not all participants reported overt gender barriers” and that “women are underrepresented in scientific dissemination, substantially less likely to be in leadership positions, and have not achieved salary parity with men.”

I also wasn’t surprised at some of the statistics, namely that the majority of academic programs and clinical subspecialty fellowships in biomedical informatics are led by men, at 75% and 83%, respectively. The authors also note that men have also held the majority of leadership roles within the American Medical Informatics Association and have received nearly two-thirds of the awards. The article goes on to say that although the National Institutes of Health has recommended conscious effort to promote gender equality, women continue to cite gender imbalances in leadership hierarchies as barriers to advancement.

The article cites specific examples of the themes, some of which really resonated with me. Regarding the idea that careers in informatics are serendipitous, that’s exactly how I wound up in this field. I was looking for a clinical job close to home, and the one that seemed the best fit also had been identified to be a pilot for the “paperless practice” concept for a large health system. The idea that careers are nurtured by supportive communities rings true for me as well, as women made up the entire leadership team of that project, and we supported each other throughout the project’s lifecycle.

One of the major differences of that team compared to others that I’ve been on is that we understood how each other operated and how each other’s efforts supported the team’s overall goals. There wasn’t any competition, and when one of us achieved a milestone or was recognized for something we did, there wasn’t any sense of someone getting ahead or outshining the rest of the team. We shared in each other’s accomplishments as much as we commiserated when things didn’t go well. We stood up for each other when things weren’t quite right.

That concept wasn’t unique to us, as noted by one respondent who explained her strategy to address subtle sexism in meetings: “A colleague who is male will say more or less the same thing [the female said], and that’s what gets picked up on. I call it out. I say ‘Oh, it’s so great that you’ve taken her idea, and now we have it in front of us.’”

Other respondents specifically called out the lack of female participation on boards, as well as differences in how male and female colleagues were treated by leadership. I’ve certainly seen the latter over the last two decades. Sometimes it’s more subtle, such as male leaders inviting male subordinates to sporting events but not their female counterparts.

But in the most egregious situations, I’ve seen male leaders refuse to meet alone with a female subordinate because of concern for potential accusations of impropriety. Male leaders who follow the latter policy actually create an exclusion zone that prevents females from advancing. I would suggest that if they aren’t comfortable meeting with their teams privately, then maybe they’re not the right person for the leadership role.

Women cited specific situations that continue to occur, including differences between recognition of men and women, financial disparities, and women being “spoken over” in meetings. When I see the latter occur in a meeting and don’t see anyone call it out, it’s hard not to think negatively of the leader who allows such behavior to occur on their watch.

Respondents also noted the importance of “being authentic and genuine, not pretending to know something you do not know or being someone you are not, and being true to oneself” as key to being a successful leader. As far as those characteristics, the idea of not pretending to know something you don’t actually know comes up often in leadership books, specifically with references to the idea that men are more likely to project knowledge they don’t possess versus women who are more likely to admit that they need to research or investigate, with the latter being perceived in some circles as a sign of weakness.

It’s like when I was a young physician in that paperless practice. I mentioned in a media interview that having computers in the rooms was great when I needed to look something up. I thought that idea made me sound progressive and that I was seeking the best information for my patient, but in reality, I was chastised by the sponsoring hospital’s vice president for giving the idea that as a physician I wasn’t all-knowing.

The article arrived in my inbox while I had been reading “The Great Stewardess Rebellion: How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet” by Nell McShane Wulfhart. Although the book is about the unequal treatment of female flight attendants in the early days of commercial air travel, there are still a lot of parallels with what women are experiencing today.

Women are often still expected to behave a certain way and have certain appearance standards that aren’t equally applied to their male counterparts. I’ve seen plenty of examples where a woman’s appearance or hair style are called out in a virtual meeting, where no one ever calls out the man with obvious bed head or the one who just slaps on a ball cap to remedy the situation. I’ve heard comments that women look “tired” and “stressed” on days that they don’t wear makeup, which is just a sad commentary on the state of things.

Even though some of the things I read in the article were disheartening, I’m glad that the ideas it brings up are receiving attention in academic circles. Only when we study an issue can we hope to find solutions.

How does your organization handle gender equity? Does it tolerate obvious imbalances or does it engage when people speak up? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 9/14/23

Updated COVID-19 vaccines should be available soon, following approvals by the US Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They’re recommended for everyone age six months and older, so I anticipate that quite a few IT folks will be scurrying around to add the vaccine to EHRs near and far.

Although many healthcare folks seem to have stopped following the data, hospitalizations have been increasing recently, but might be leveling off. I’ve been traveling and have definitely seen an uptick in masking, with the most recent trip revealing about 5% of passengers and 20% of service workers being masked. The latter are less likely to have paid time off than other categories of workers and are likely to have negative impacts from illness, so it makes sense. Of the people who are masking, most seem to be wearing higher-filtration masks rather than basic surgical masks, and I didn’t see any cloth masks. Of note, two of my recent flights have been less than half full, so it appears the summer travel season is indeed winding down.

As far as masking in healthcare environments, I’ve seen a couple of articles addressing the topic. A recent opinion piece in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggests that healthcare organizations should make decisions that place patient safety first and should consider masking “as part of routine healthcare policies.” They suggest that care delivery sites “should be mindful of continuing areas of uncertainty while integrating the lessons learned into our hospital-based practices to prevent harm to vulnerable patients rather than reverting to suboptimal pre-pandemic behaviors.” I appreciate the fact that they called out the notion that the good old days weren’t necessarily that good in many care locations. In addition to vulnerable patients, there are plenty of vulnerable healthcare workers out there who deserve a safe work environment.

Regardless of the COVID case counts, the reality is that a lot of hospitals and health systems are still stressed. Some of the urgent care centers in my area have been closed for an extended time period due to lack of staffing, and many of my former colleagues have retired or left practice for other pursuits. My hospital colleagues tell me they’re still having staffing issues especially in labor and delivery, and apparently there’s a shortage looming for anesthesia medications, so it might be a bumpy winter.

I visited the local Costco for my flu vaccine this week and it was a seamless process, although I skipped the hot dog and soda combo and instead went for the sample of Kinder Bueno chocolate on the way out the door. There’s also a new vaccine out for Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) intended for pregnant women as a way to protect their newborns, so I anticipate people are updating their EHRs and clinical decision support reminders to promote that one during patient visits as well.

This month’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association features an interesting back and forth about so-called EHR “gag clauses,” in response to a recent article that looked at whether those clauses had negatively impacted the inclusion of screenshots in peer-reviewed literature. Informatics guru Ross Koppel submitted a letter to the editor noting that informatics experts had been pushing for removal of those clauses since 2009. He also mentioned that informaticists may still be living in a climate of fear that vendors will punish them for publishing screenshots, regardless of moves by ONC or anyone else to remove such gag clauses. He concludes by stating, “Ethical vendors should have welcomed feedback about problematic EHR screens, rather than punishing medical informaticists who sought to improve those EHRs by demonstrating their dangers to patient safety.”

The authors of the original article responded to Dr. Koppel, agreeing with his comments but also pointing out that ONC and scientific journals should encourage the inclusion of screenshots in submitted articles and also that such screenshots should be included in safety bulletins and other documents covering EHR issues. They suggest that research needs to be done to understand why screenshots aren’t being included, and one way to do this would be to ask authors whether they’re aware of policy changes that prohibit gag clauses. They conclude by calling out Dr. Koppel’s comment that “…we should all be troubled by EHR vendor actions to prohibit sharing screenshots and that the EHR vendor insistence that the gag clauses are necessary for protecting intellectual property (IP) is meaningless if the IP is protecting poor design.” For those of us who have worked in EHRs that range from suboptimal to downright dangerous, that’s pretty much a mic drop right there.

As medicine has become more complex, the need for patient advocacy has increased. I was surprised to see a recent research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine about the prevalence of industry ties in patient advocacy organizations. The authors looked at the top 50 US patient advocacy organizations (ranked by revenue) and looked at ties between their senior leaders and the pharmaceutical or medical device industries. They found that a whopping 74% had board members or senior leaders with prior or current industry ties, with half of the organizations having conflicts of interest among paid staff or executives.

Although past ties are certainly worrisome, having a current conflict of interest seems particularly concerning. I appreciate the authors’ methodology. They used publicly available data from GuideStar to identify the high-revenue patient advocacy organizations and investigated the LinkedIn profiles of those listed on the organization websites. They also used other readily available sources such as annual reports, public tax documents, personal websites, and publicly posted biographies.

The authors listed some limitations, including “incomplete disclosure of board members, senior paid staff, or executive employment history, as well as the possibility of omissions from website profiles, limited (and likely underestimating) our characterization of industry ties.” Overall, they raise the concern that industry is influencing the advocacy organizations’ positions on patient education, policy making, and treatment guidelines. Definitely something to think about when you’re following the money in the complex web of the healthcare industry.

What do you think about conflicts of interest in patient advocacy organizations? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 9/11/23

I was recently in a meeting of healthcare executives where the topic in question was how to best leverage technology when working with “older patients.” Compared to my physician experiences with the senior population, I found some of their attitudes to be not only outdated, but their opinions to be inaccurate. I heard statements such as “retirees are technologically naïve” and “most of them don’t have smartphones.”

I’d like to see those executives join me in an exam room when a Medicare-age patient pulls out their phone and logs into their patient portal to provide data that I can’t otherwise access. They might also find themselves educated when a patient pulls out their phone to show me pictures that their grandchildren texted to them.

According to data from The Senior List, 98% of people older than age 60 have mobile phones, which splits to 81% smartphone users and 17% basic mobile phone users. Approximately 75% of seniors text at least once daily, with most indicating that texting is a preferred communication method.

A whopping 65% of adults in that age group spend three hours or more on their phones daily, and seniors have an average of 25 apps installed on their phones. The most popular apps are those addressing weather, shopping, social media, games, and news. Health tracking apps are present in around 49% of seniors’ app installations. As far as app use, social media leads the way as far as percentage of app usage, with Facebook being the favorite followed by Amazon, Google, and The Weather Channel. The data in question was gathered in 2021, and based on what I see in the community, I woud guess that smartphone use and app utilization have both grown since then.

One of the health system executives kept citing “the data” indicating that smartphones and seniors don’t mix, but didn’t have an actual citation. He said he had seen “multiple research studies in the news this week,” so I decided to try to figure out what he was talking about. I found a couple of articles in the lay press from mid-August that talked about COVID, seniors, and text messages not mixing, but they all linked back to the same scholarly article, so I hardly consider that an overwhelming amount of new research.

The study in question looked at text messages sent to more than 17,000 Medicare-age seniors during the initial distribution phase of the COVID vaccine. Patients were sent a text invitation to receive the vaccine, but 28% reported technical problems. The authors dug deeper into 4,200 responses, coding them based on issues experienced by the recipients. Approximately 7% of seniors had issues responding to the text invitation, including responding in the wrong format, delays in responding, or inability to get help when they requested it.

Based on the results, researchers recommended interventions including the use of natural language processing, flexible response formats, and improved feedback processes when conducting such text-based campaigns in the future. Based on my experiences as a consulting CMIO during the pandemic, I would also recommend that organizations look at the scripting they are sending out and whether the text of the messages is contributing to the confusion.

I was hired by a couple of organizations during the pandemic to support their efforts reaching patients, and some of the draft language that I was sent to proof-read or polish had definite room for improvement. Common themes I encountered during that time included reading levels that were too high, complex sentence structure, and questions with responses that didn’t have an appropriate response choice listed.

It should also be noted that some of these patients might have been receiving competing or conflicting messages from different organizations that added to the confusion. For example, they could have received different messages from their primary care physician, a subspecialty physician, a health system where they’ve had diagnostic or laboratory testing, a senior center, a retail pharmacy, and an insurance carrier. Duplicative messages might just have been ignored, confounding the data.

The article lists the specific language that was used as part of the campaign studied, and even I found it confusing. Recipients were prompted to select from three options, which were presented to them with a request to indicate their choice by keying in either “A” or “G” or “D” which were presented in that order. The offering of such choices ordered in that manner is counter to some key usability and patient engagement principles, especially in a population where recipients might be more conditioned to choose from an ordinal list – “ABC” or “123,” for example, rather than “AGD.”

The article noted that “the response options letters in the message were chosen from a set of letter groups and assigned at the time of delivery based on the next message service’s automated batch-processing system,” which is a statement I don’t really understand.

Had this script come across my consulting desk, I might have made it even simpler with yes/no questions and a bit more branching. Although it may have created complexity for those configuring the system, it would have been more straightforward for the potential patients receiving it.

Those patients who wanted to schedule online were told to enter their email address and that they would receive a link within two days. That requires additional steps for the recipient versus just providing a link right in the text exchange.

The study authors looked at some of the “non-conforming” messages that patients sent that the system was unable to process. Some of them included statements recognizing typographical errors (such as “Sorry, I sent wrong response, D is the response”) and requests to just go to a website. Others included statements around the patient having already received a vaccine or auto-generated replies that were sent because the patient was driving when the text message was received.

The authors also noted that the campaign wasn’t optimized to address the needs of patients whose primary language wasn’t English. Other limitations included medical records anomalies that may have led to the generation of messages to the wrong recipients.

It should also be noted that many of these campaigns were being done in the heat of the moment due to unpredictable vaccine availability. On some of the campaigns where I assisted, clients offered a premium for rush turnaround of content. Several of the outreach programs were built in a couple of days, and one was actually configured in less than 12 hours. Health systems were under immense pressure at the time and might not have had the luxury of constructing a campaign compliant with usability best practices.

Those all add to the idea of not using this type of data (which is now two years old in addition to the other flaws noted) to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water as far as understanding how seniors will interact with technology. It will be interesting to see follow-up studies on the topic.

Does your organization do anything specific when tailoring campaigns to different demographic groups? Have you considered specific testing on your target audience? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 9/7/23

I enjoy giving back to medical schools and residency programs in my area, so I’m looking forward to teaching an upcoming class on clinical decision support and how clinicians use it in the real world. I had barely started culling research articles and building my slide deck when this New England Journal of Medicine article virtually dropped in my lap.

The authors found that although there has been a lot of attention to ensure that the clinical decision support tools themselves are safe, there hasn’t been enough attention to making sure that clinicians understand how they work or how best to use them in clinical settings. Over the last two decades, I’ve seen plenty of clinicians disregard even the most basic clinical decision support interventions, so the article definitely had my attention. 

The authors suggest that medical education curricula should include content on how clinicians should best incorporate algorithm-generated information into their own decision making, and to discuss the use of clinical decision support tools with patients. Trainees should also be taught to consider how different patient data inputs might change the output of a tool, as well as how to evaluate whether a tool might be missing key elements needed to appropriately evaluate a given patient.

The authors propose that learners should engage in practice-based training scenarios where they use an algorithm, discuss its predictive value, understand how it is using different data points, and understand its overall effectiveness. The article also included a brief history of clinical decision support tools, which have been around since the 1970s, and I’ll be using some of their examples in my presentation.

Speaking of presentations, I recently attended one delivered by some “experts” who advertised a session to help “technology people” better understand how to work with physician end users. There were some interesting statistics thrown out, many without citations. One that seemed very specific was the claim that the average physician can only type 22 words per minute. I decided to hit the medical literature and see what I could find, with scholarly articles putting physicians more in the range of 30 words per minute. That’s a pretty significant difference and I would caution folks that it’s not a good idea to throw that kind of data out without citations when you’re speaking to a group of technical experts.

I think they also failed to understand that there might be clinical informaticists in the audience or that some of the things they were saying about clinician end users were offensive. Comments such as “you have to dumb it down when you’re working with physicians” are a poor idea, especially when those physicians are on the webinar.

Another strategy they advised when working with physicians was that of creating special roles and/or titles for physicians to get them to be EHR ambassadors to their peers, particularly without additional compensation. In recommending that a physician be named something along the lines of Regional Site Director of EHR Adoption, they went on to say, “Titles are cheap. We give them away like candy.” They had some other ridiculous things to say, and I was glad I had a cocktail in hand to help make it through the session. Another clueless move: they failed to recognize that often EHR analysts, implementation specialists, and other “technology people” tend to be fiercely loyal to their end users, so I’m sure the speakers didn’t make many friends with those folks, either.

A friend recently mentioned his experience with EqualityMD, which is a technology platform dedicated to helping LGBTQ+ patients who are seeking healthcare providers who have been recognized for their delivery of respectful and affirming healthcare. The system gathers patient information, including biometric data, race, pronouns, gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and languages spoken. It also gathers information about patient preferences for their care teams and ultimately suggests physicians and other providers who might be a good match. Patients can then schedule with and engage providers through the platform. My friend has had a good experience with the solution and feels like the company is “the real deal,” so I’ll be interested in following them over the coming months.

Sometimes I get my news from HIStalk just like everyone else. Earlier this week, Mr. H mentioned Air Force physician complaints about issues where adolescent patients can’t access their records via patient portal. As someone who has been dealing with the challenges of privacy and confidentiality issues faced by healthcare providers who see adolescents for the last eight years, this didn’t seem too off the mark to me. Mr. H is always great about providing citations so I followed his handy link to the original article in Stars and Stripes.

Apparently one of the Air Force’s chief medical information officers told a gathering of people, “So there’s this weird dead zone as of right now with the portal. With children 13 to 17, you can’t see their medical information and your kid cannot create a login because they’re not 18 yet.”

Although this may sound wild to some, it’s actually the way that a large number of healthcare organizations in the US have to handle adolescent confidentiality and privacy due to clashes between state laws and EHR functionality. It’s certainly not unique to Oracle Health. Most of the EHR vendors have a long way to go as far as being able to allow teens to access their data online, but prevent parents from seeing information that might cause harm to the patient. Some systems are better than others at allowing different parts of the record to be parsed for parent view versus patient view. However, the fear of legal issues seems to be a driving force for many provider organizations who are deciding how to configure their EHRs and patient portals.

There have been quite a few presentations on this at conferences, ranging from the AMIA Annual Symposium to various EHR vendor user groups. I’d love to have policymakers sit down with adolescent patients, their parents, their guardians, and their care teams. That’s the only way they’re ever going to understand the complex situations around which they are trying to create rules which seem like a good idea, but ultimately backfire on many of the involved parties. Until then, or until EHR vendors step up, we will all be stuck with the current complex web of proxy access, parental rights, and different ages of medical consent not only across state lines but across medical conditions as well.

How is your organization handling adolescent privacy and confidentiality with respect to access in the patient portal? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 8/31/23

Sometimes a marketing campaign just resonates with me, as did this one from Intelligent Medical Objects with its connection to “How to Train Your Dragon.”

I receive a tremendous number of emails from companies that are trying to get my attention or trying to get me to consider their products. The majority of them are annoying (especially the ones that address me as “Hey Jayne!”) but this one not only hit the mark, but gave me a smile as well.

Large language models are going to continue to be a hot topic for the foreseeable future, and the data used to train models can vary widely in quality. Bad data can lead to bias and unanticipated outcomes.

IMO continues to be a leader in the field of semantic interoperability, helping organizations make sure that data makes sense not only on the back end, but for the clinicians who have to look at it every day and the patients who are increasingly exposed to their healthcare data. I remember first implementing its products many years ago, and the fact that its ProblemIT solution was the only initiative for which my physicians actually sent me “thank you” emails.

New legislation is pending in the US Senate. The Behavioral Health Information Technology Coordination Act would provide $20 million in funding annually for behavioral health EHRs and would also require the development of standards for those products. Additionally, CMS would work with different bodies, including Medicaid, to promote EHR adoption and interoperability for behavioral health.

Many organizations have struggled with documentation of behavioral health care in EHRs, including keeping up with privacy regulations for different jurisdictions and age groups and dealing with information-sharing among the treatment team. Primary care physicians in the US provide a great deal of behavioral health services, but many find it difficult to get the information they need to adequately care for their patients, including histories of previous treatments and medication records. They sometimes struggle to coordinate with therapists, even when both are employed by the health system, because organizations are especially worried about inadvertent disclosure of this specially protected data.

In my area, it seems like the majority of non-facility behavioral health providers are not employed by large health systems. Many are independent and don’t participate with insurance companies, requiring patients to pay out of pocket. This shortage means that the wait time for a psychiatrist for Medicaid patients is 9-12 months, which pushes even more care to be delivered by primary care physicians. One health system recently opened a behavioral health emergency department to help address surging access needs, but it was quickly overwhelmed.

When you’re not taking insurance or participating in governmental payer programs, there is little incentive to use an EHR versus traditional paper documentation, especially when you’re not expecting to have to share data very much if at all. Behavioral health wasn’t initially included in the Meaningful Use incentive programs of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) of 2009, which also likely contributed to reduced technology adoption.

From Latent Luddite: “Re: technology’s unanticipated consequences. Did you see this article about autonomous car crashes in San Francisco? Great example.” I hadn’t seen the article before a reader sent it along, but the long and short of it is that General Motors is having a problem with its Cruise autonomous vehicles. As a result, they’re cutting the size of the San Francisco fleet in half while investigations are underway after recent crashes. In the most recent incident, a vehicle without a human driver was struck by an emergency response vehicle, leading to a request by the Department of Motor Vehicles to reduce the number of Cruise vehicles in service. The new guidelines call for no more than 50 vehicles in service during the day and 150 at night.

A recent decision by the Public Utilities Commission allowed competing autonomous taxi service Waymo to also operate in the city at all hours, so one can speculate as to what might be happening when services are competing for fares. The general manager of Cruise in San Francisco stated that the recent incident was “complicated by the fact that the emergency vehicle was in the oncoming lane of traffic, which it had moved into to bypass the red light.” I’ve been in plenty of situations in urban areas when an emergency vehicle is approaching and it’s difficult to figure out where it’s coming from due to echoes and clutter on the street. It’s also difficult to predict how other drivers might react when you’re deciding how to try to move your vehicle to get out of the way. Data from the company notes that Cruise vehicles have encountered emergency vehicles more than 168,000 times this year, which seems an amazing statistic to me.

The American Telemedicine Association recently rebranded its conference, which is now referred to as ATA Nexus 2024. The upcoming event will be held May 5-7 in Phoenix. I’m not a huge fan of conferences that run on the weekend and also spill into the workweek, making them the worst of both worlds. ATA has moved its conferences back and forth in the last couple of years, so it will be interesting to see whether this format is better attended over time. There is quite a bit of work to be done in telehealth, especially in the legislative and policy arenas. I anticipate this conference will continue to be a hot ticket for those focusing on that particular modality. The conference’s call for speakers is open and interested parties can submit proposals through September 22.

I recently met up with a colleague whose employer provides multi-week sabbaticals at certain employment milestones. We discussed that having time away from work often makes people think about how they manage their time, whether they have acceptable work-life balance, and how they want to manage their priorities moving forward.

My friend spent his sabbatical in a relatively spartan location, leading him to think twice about the luxury he came home to, with its large TV and what he describes as “entirely too much sporting equipment.” He said the most profound thing he experienced was a desire to better explore and experience his hometown, which he felt he’s been limited in doing by the hours he works.

I’m personally a big fan of the staycation, which is a great way to explore your surroundings and figure out what you might be missing out on. Our conversation reminded me of the need to take time for myself, so I’m hiking with a friend this long holiday weekend. Fortunately, the weather has calmed down a little bit, so I’m looking forward to seeing what the trail has to offer.

What are your plans for the long weekend if you’re able to take time off? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 8/28/23

I enjoy working with residents and students, so I was glad to see this recent article looking at the role of electronic health records in medical residency training programs.

When I was working in the EHR industry, I saw a tremendous variation in how organizations wanted to treat learners with respect to electronic documentation. Some organizations would not allow students to access the EHR in any capacity other than read-only, which almost certainly hampered their abilities to learn how to manage the EHR when conducting patient interviews or when taking a medical history. Others would allow students to have limited interaction with the EHR, but placed their documentation in a separate clinical note, distinct from the attending physician and others on the care team. This approach is problematic because it fails to see the student as a member of the care team, and also creates additional work for the attending physician to perform completely separate documentation rather than being able to update and affirm the student’s documentation.

As far as residency programs, I’ve seen a wide spectrum of access and EHR usage there as well. I’ve seen organizations that have graduated security groups, where interns have less access than lower-level residents who may have less access than the highest level of residents. It can be complicated to advance everyone to different security groups from year to year, especially if an entire class doesn’t advance at the same time due to taking family or medical leave or having to repeat a rotation.

Generally speaking, in the US, a physician who has completed the intern year and who has passed the appropriate licensing exams can get a permanent medical license (as opposed to a training license), which might bring with it their own DEA number and state controlled substance number. This becomes fun when the resident might be rotating on some services as a learner and needs to operate under one set of credentials but also moonlights on a different service at the same hospital under their permanent credentials.

A friend of mine who works in the process improvement department at a major health system has been asked to do a pilot project around these issues at one of the hospitals, which is having challenges getting its residents the right access to do their jobs. It will be interesting to see how that unfolds since they won’t have the opportunity to pilot the new workflows until the next class of interns is selected in March 2024.

Back to the JAMIA article, it looks at the ways in which EHRs impact resident clinical skills and how the systems’ use impacts patient encounters. The authors conducted qualitative interviews with 32 residents and 13 faculty members or clinical staff in an internal medicine residency program affiliated with a US medical school. The latter point is an important differentiator, because not all training programs are affiliated with medical schools. Those that aren’t are referred to as community-based programs, and although some provide the same experience as those programs that are associated with medical schools, there may be some subtle differences in how residents interact with preceptors and other members of the teaching staff. Although that’s a relatively small sample size and only represents the experiences of those in a single medical specialty, the authors had some interesting findings.

For background, the authors note the breadth of EHR use in the US, with 96% of hospitals and 78% of office-based practices using certified EHRs. I visited one of that remaining 22% of medical practices just last week and gazed with nostalgia at their giant rolling racks of patient charts. I didn’t envy the physician scribbling away during my visit, but I felt I received good care in a timely way, so I didn’t miss the presence of an EHR in the visit. Interestingly, I also received an invitation to visit the practice’s patient portal, so I’ll have to see what it actually contains when I get some free time. The authors also note the continued increase in EHR documentation requirements in the US, which has been partially enabled by the presence of EHRs.

I found it interesting that the researchers interviewed residents on days when residents were scheduled to be in an outpatient clinic, although they noted that they selected days where “resident schedules at the clinic were typically less busy.” The authors, who are also faculty members at the residency program, would ask the residents to be interviewed “during a break in their day,” which is interesting as to the other stressors that residents might have been experiencing at the time of the interview. I’ve done plenty of qualitative research in my career, and I think I might have been more inclined to schedule interviews outside of the clinic environment. The approach they took only allowed them to interview 32 of the program’s 54 residents, but the authors noted that “repetition of responses and minimal novel information in later interviews indicated we had reached sufficient saturation in our sample.” The average interview lasted 23 minutes and was recorded. Interestingly, the recordings were initially transcribed using an AI-based web site, then were reviewed by paid assistants, with one of the authors conducting a final verification of the transcripts.

During the interviews, residents noted that the need to address quality measures during patient encounters added some challenges to the use of the EHR and contributed at times to shifting focus away from the primary reason for the patient’s visit. Addressing those measures also took time that some felt could have been spent coming to a diagnosis and creating a treatment plan for the patient’s presenting concern. The study methods indicated that patients were roomed by a medical assistant who took some preliminary information from the patient but who didn’t address quality measures. Based on some of the participant comments, it’s clear that data was in the chart for the provider to update the quality measures, so it’s unclear why the organization wouldn’t use a less-expensive resource, such as the medical assistant, to update the quality measures as opposed to expecting the physician to do it. That seems to violate one of the key tenets of clinical efficiency, which is to have all members of the team working at the top level of their licensure.

Most of the residents said they spent more than half of their clinic time working in the EHR and often had to access it at home. Although some residents felt that use of the EHR became easier as they worked through the training program, multiple senior residents felt they were still struggling with the EHR. Additionally, residents often had to ask questions about EHR use on the fly. Although that’s a great way to develop lifelong learning skills, it can be frustrating when you’re early on in your training and trying to learn the nuts and bolts of seeing patients. The authors found that due to these sentiments, some residents actively tried to avoid or at least minimize EHR use during patient visits.

Some of the raw resident comments were included. I found this one very telling as far as whether a good clinical informaticist was involved in the system build: “They just have these yellow boxes and some administrators told our attendings that we absolutely have to click these yellow boxes. But it’s basically just redundant because I’m already doing it. But if I don’t do it their way, then it doesn’t give them a little green light in their system.” It makes me sad to know that there are still systems out there that lack intelligent design and configuration.

The authors note that while it’s important to develop a culture where residents ask questions about EHR use, it’s also important to note that not everyone enters residency with the same experience with EHRs, the same computer skills, or the same motivation to learn. One faculty member described the EHR training that residents and faculty received as “frankly terrible and doesn’t really prepare you for the actual application or use of this software.” Residents reported learning from each other and from medical assistants as well as from the faculty, but I didn’t see any mentions of them reaching out to dedicated EHR trainers for additional support beyond their initial orientation training.

It definitely seems like a missed opportunity for education, especially since best practices for EHR implementation involve regular follow-up training to solidify skills and teach new content. This would also help counter any inhibitions that residents have about asking for help, if follow-up training is just part of the program for everyone.

The authors conclude by calling on residency programs to “find ways to effectively support their residents’ learning to incorporate EHRs into their work and streamline documentation requirements to maximize the development of residents’ clinical skills.” Since the authors are faculty at the residency program where this study was conducted, it would be interesting to see some follow-up on whether they were successful in changing some of the roles and responsibilities distribution found in team-based care in order to meet this objective. For example, did they hire additional medical assistants to better support the residents? Did they arrange for additional training to ensure mastery of the EHR? If anyone is connected with the University of Nevada Reno, I’d be interested to hear any updates.

What are your thoughts about EHR use by residents and other trainees? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 8/24/23

As a clinical informaticist, a lot of my time is spent thinking about how technology impacts physicians and other users of the systems that care delivery organizations implement. Patient experience is sometimes an afterthought, with organizations doing a variable job taking that into consideration.

However, I’m seeing more and more discussions in the clinical informatics world about how technology is impacting patients. Predictably, there’s a lot of attention on artificial intelligence right now, but I’m starting to see more attention given to the basics – namely screen time among children and adolescents. An article recently published in JAMA Pediatrics looks at the amount of screen time that children are exposed to at one year of age and how it might impact communication and problem solving skills at age 2 and 4.

The study was conducted in Japan and used questionnaires about screen time that were completed by parents of nearly 8,000 pediatric patients. Data showed that children of first-time mothers who were younger, those whose mothers had postpartum depression, and those with lower income and educational levels tended to have higher levels of screen time. The authors concluded that children who were exposed to more than four hours of screen time daily were more likely to have developmental delays. Both areas were delayed at age 2 and 4, and additionally, it was noted that fine motor and personal/social skills were delayed at age 2 but resolved by age 4.

Most of the major EHRs I’ve used have prompts for pediatric providers to deliver anticipatory guidance around screen time when they are conducting well-child visits, but I wonder if we’ll see action from professional organizations that change these recommendations.

From Madison Maiden: “Re: Epic UGM. Judy opened the executive address with her ‘family photo album,’ including pictures of her adventures in Minnesota and Oregon as a young person along with tales of her time swimming, canoeing, and otherwise being outdoors. This year’s theme is ‘Castaway’ and she described the healthcare environment as ‘tumultuous’ and listed hospital closures and reduced access to services as critical issues facing patients. She said that Epic’s headcount is up to 14,000 employees who are in the office full time. Another speaker said that more than 38,000 people were watching the session either in person or via live stream.” That background helps explain some of the décor adjacent to the Deep Space auditorium, where an entire level is devoted to overwhelming woodsiness with the inclusion of camping gear reminiscent of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Other readers chimed in to mention that the “Castaway” theme included homage to “Gilligan’s Island” as well as the Tom Hanks movie of the same title.

CMS is launching a new Electronic Prescribing of Controlled Substances (EPCS) Program Prescriber User Group, tasked with giving input on educational content and the usability of the CMS EPCS Program prescriber portal. The application process is open through August 30 at 8 p.m. ET and those interested should plan to commit approximately 10 hours to the group over the coming year. CMS hopes to have various specialties, practice locations, and prescribing patterns represented, so if you’re interested or know someone who is, please submit.

I’m mentoring some alumni from my medical school who have decided that clinical medicine isn’t for them. One wants to dip their toes into clinical informatics and asked if I would take a look at their LinkedIn profile and provide some feedback. Although their work history and education sections looked great, I advised that they replace the photo with a head shot that wasn’t obviously cropped out of a group pictures. Generally, by the time you reach age 30, especially in the era of the Google Photos Magic Eraser and similar features on the iPhone, one should have a passable head shot that doesn’t have other people’s hands or shoulders in it. I also recommended that they update their headline to remove their realtor credentials if they want to be taken more seriously when applying for informatics positions.

Illinois-based Advocate Aurora Health has settled claims about its use of the Meta Pixel and other web trackers for $12.25 million. The settlement covers multiple claims filed after the health system disclosed a breach affecting more than 3 million patients. The attorneys in the case will receive $4.3 million plus expenses and the class representatives will receive $3,500 each. Patients who join the class and file a claim form will receive a payment from the remaining settlement fund.

Blue Shield of California has partnered with Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, Amazon Pharmacy, and others in a new model to attempt to transform prescription drug management in the US. The plan hopes to achieve a $500 million annual savings on medications for its 4.8 million members. The initiative, titled Pharmacy Care Reimagined, is supposed to improve transparency as well as lowering costs. Prescription drugs are big business, with large numbers of the population taking multiple prescriptions at any given time. US spending on prescription medications is in the $600 billion range, with an average of $1,500 per patient per year. When I was in a traditional family medicine practice, it was a constant battle to try to convince patients that low-cost generic medications were as good if not better than flashy newer drugs with equally flashy price tags.

This particular effort hopes to remove some of the non-value-added links found in the typical pharmacy supply chain, where more than a dozen entities can be part of the process. It looks to reduce the players to five, including pharmacy, specialty pharmacy, benefits management, payer, and complex care management entities. I’ve only tangentially followed Mark Cuban’s entry into the pharmacy world, but I did enjoy a recent Fireside conversation between him and negotiation expert Chris Voss. When asked what he sees that kills time and brain power, Cuban said, “Meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings.” He went on to say, “People over-meet and over-call … You kill so much time. I try to only do meetings if I have to come to a conclusion or there’s no other way. Same with phone calls. Every meeting is, ‘Who got the donuts? What do you got going on? How are the kids?’ If it were up to me, if I had to have a meeting – and I tried this early on in my career, and I wasn’t established enough to get away with it – I’d take away all the chairs from the meeting room. It’s amazing how quickly meetings get over with if no one has a chair or some place to sit.”

I once worked for a development organization that did some amazing standup meetings and produced quality products at a breakneck pace, so I’m on board with that philosophy. They also brought in a dedicated management consultant to do a quick hit project to simplify their meeting structure, so maybe they were more forwarding thinking than I might have thought at the time.

What are your thoughts about reducing drug costs in the US? Can Blue Shield of California and Mark Cuban get it done? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 8/21/23

One of my favorite practice administrators has worked her way up through her health system and is now the head of human resources for the organization. We were catching up the other day and talked about some of the challenges she is facing in her new role.

Of course, recruiting is a major focus, especially in direct patient-facing roles such as nursing and social work. They’re also having challenges in recruiting respiratory therapists and child life specialists, the latter being more important as they’re trying to grow their presence in the pediatric hospital space.

However, retention is the largest issue she is facing, describing it as an arms race between competing care delivery organizations that serve the same markets. She’s finding more frontline healthcare workers who are willing to move from one health system to another over a few dollars in hourly pay than was common in years past, which is causing a lot of undesired turnover.

Hospitals and health systems shouldn’t be surprised by this. For some time, employees have been increasingly feeling like loyalty is a thing of the past. This sentiment was exacerbated by the things that happened during the height of the COVID pandemic, when caregivers were treated as expendable and were not supported with adequate personal protective equipment or adequate time to recover from the horror they were experiencing on a daily basis.

In my area, we saw hundreds of nurses leave a given hospital to become travel nurses at a hospital across town, making up to three times the pay. Now we’ve arrived at a new normal where salaries have adjusted and most of the travel nurses are gone, but healthcare workers are still voting with their feet. Hospitals may continue to argue that they’re working on slim margins and don’t have the money to keep up with their competitors, but I’m seeing them become increasingly creative with strategies to retain people.

My colleague’s organization is banking on the fact that AI might help augment staffing in more task-based departments such as the central billing office, credentials verification office, and even within her own human resources department. Not surprisingly, the story they’re telling is that as AI takes on tasks that require lower-level skills, they will be able to move those employees to other roles, including cross-training them to work in clinical spaces.

I think there is some level of wishful thinking in this regard. Not everyone has the temperament to work with patients who are often going through some of the worst things they can imagine. Some of the best workers I’ve encountered in clinical areas view their work more as a calling than as a job, and you can tell easily which employees are which when you encounter them as a patient.

She noted that one of her most pressing challenges will be changing attitudes about workers taking time off. She’s made it a point of engaging directly with workers to understand how they feel about the organization, and not just relying on surveys, which may not fully explain what’s going on with a workforce. She has found that some of the nurses feel guilty about taking time off, because it creates additional load for their co-workers.

Other workers, such as those in technology support and other departments, feel like they’re perceived as not being team players when they take all the time off to which they’re entitled. The organization buys back unused blocks of paid time off and has no minimum on how much employees have to take during the year. She’s been starting to socialize the idea that workers should have to take a minimum amount of time off in order to encourage them to recharge.

She’s also floating the idea of paid hours to be used for volunteering in the community, which is an idea that I really like. She’s trying to get approval for a relatively small number of hours to start, four hours every six months. In a large organization, however, that’s a substantial commitment, so it will be interesting to see how that effort plays out. I suspect that many of their employees are already supporting community organizations, so for them it would be additional compensation for things they are already doing, but for others it might be a way to encourage employees to engage in a way they haven’t done.

Given recent attention to student loans, she’s also considering expanding the organization’s loan repayment efforts. That might be attractive to younger workers, but won’t mean much to older workers. It will be interesting to see what she comes up with to balance that out across other employee segments.

I’m excited for her and enjoyed seeing her enthusiasm for her new role. Only time will tell how much support she’ll receive from her organization and whether other members of the leadership will see the proposed changes in the spirit in which they are intended. I’ve seen a fair amount of turnover in human resources roles in the last few years, so I hope she has success in this endeavor. I can imagine it might be easy to burn out if she doesn’t get the support she’s expecting, and a burned-out human resources leader isn’t going to be in the best position to help her co-workers.

With the Epic User Group Meeting this week, lots of informatics folks and health system executives have descended on Madison, Wisconsin. According to one of my friends who is a local but not affiliated with Epic, it’s “when we hunker down and don’t go anywhere, because the traffic is terrible and all the restaurants are packed.” Traffic in Madison is nothing to sneeze at normally, so I don’t blame folks for laying low when the big show is in town.

To increase my knowledge about the area, he sent me this article about the “great butter and cheese fire of 1991,” which is burned into the memories of many locals. The fire, which took more than a week to fully extinguish, was ultimately attributed to a malfunctioning forklift battery. The fire’s intensity was fueled by burning insulation and more than 12,000 tons of butter and cheese along with 5,000 tons of hams, hot dogs, cranberries, and baked goods. Firefighters on the scene described at “river of butter” that flowed when the building collapsed and described five-foot-deep pools of butter.

Firefighters were hampered by a “moat” of dairy products that kept fuel trucks from reaching the ladder trucks, leading to the need for people to hand-carry buckets of diesel fuel to keep the trucks running. Personnel from the Department of Natural Resources were on hand to protect local streams and lakes from the flood of butter. Retention ponds were used to contain butter that was flowing faster than it could be pumped into the sewer system. Several dams were built to control the torrents of butter. Ultimately firefighters had to discard most of their personal gear due to contamination and ongoing rancid smells. Here’s to hoping that we never see another event like this in our lifetimes, and that everyone headed to Madison has uneventful travel.

Are you attending the Epic User Group Meeting, and what are your favorite parts of the event? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 8/17/23

Many companies are talking about the work they are trying to do using artificial intelligence, but some of the writeups I see range from overly vague to downright nonsensical.

I was intrigued to see an email from Tripadvisor inviting me to “kick-start your planning” by trying the company’s new AI trip planning product in a pre-launch version. It promises to use the answers to four questions about a proposed trip to “sift through over one billion traveler reviews and opinions.” From there, the user is supposed to get a custom daily itinerary based on their interests, and it’s supposed to be sharable with others. I decided to check it out and see how a more consumer-facing offering behaves compared to the healthcare-centric products I usually look at.

I ran the AI trip builder against a trip I had recently planned to a city where I’ve wanted to go, for which I have already compiled a list of recommendations. The solution asked me where I wanted to go (city and state) as well as proposed dates and whether I was going solo, with a partner, with friends, or with family. From there, I was asked to choose attractions, hidden gems, museums, history, culture, food, outdoors, wine and beer, arts and theater, or adventure and sports as the ways I would want to spend my time.

After about a minute, it put together an itinerary, tagged as “powered by AI,” for five full days of sightseeing. I was pleased to see that two of the restaurants on my list matched the Tripadvisor list. However, there was a lot of detail lacking. For example, there was no input for how I preferred to get around – would I have a car, or rely on public transportation? Based on the distances between recommended activities, I suspect it made the assumption that most travelers in the US have a car.

The way that different locations was grouped together didn’t make a lot of sense. I would have expected that AI should be able to use addresses and directions to put things together in a way that makes more sense. Given the amount of data available to the system, it could also have generated some other useful information, such as a forecasted budget per day and a total for the trip. It didn’t ask any information about cost, and also didn’t include any lodging options, which for me is a big part of planning any trip.

Hopefully more bells and whistles will come in the released version. But overall, it didn’t feel like there was much difference between this and other itineraries I’ve seen in travel magazines that I read while researching my trip.

I ran it again against a trip I took earlier this year and the results were even more erratic. It sent me to the same historic district on three different days, recommending that I visit adjacent properties separately even though they were within a block or two of each other. I double-checked the sites’ operating hours to make sure that wasn’t a factor, but they were all open all of the days. It also included the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, which isn’t necessarily what I think of when I’m looking for great food on a vacation, although I do always like biscuits and gravy.

Maybe some additional functionality could include an understanding of where the trip is in relation to where you reside, whether you’ve been to the area before, and if so, what you did last time. To truly take it to the next level, it could ask if you want to eliminate options that are also available within 10 miles of your home location.

Alas, I’ve spent enough time in this industry to understand the concept of the Minimum Viable Product, so if they were looking at providing something with features that might draw in an early adopter type user or might help validate a product idea, they’re on their way. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any way to provide feedback, so I think that’s a missed opportunity for the Tripadvisor development team. Hopefully they are doing some additional testing where they’ll actually get user feedback. In my experience, that’s the best way to evolve a product.

From All Work, No Pay: “Re: HIMSS selling its conference. It sounds like there might be financial troubles, since the organization is not making good on honorarium payments for CIOs and others who participated in focus groups at the HIMSS23 conference. Staffers have cited the conference’s transition as a reason for the delay.” These focus groups are usually hosted by HIMSS Corporate Members, who pay a hefty fee in exchange for the opportunity to either pitch to or pick the collective brains of various healthcare executives. Attendees usually receive a gift card in addition to lunch. I’ve been to HIMSS meetings where it’s hard to find lunch without waiting in a huge line, so I can see the draw of making the trek to one of the private meeting rooms, which are usually in the basements of the convention centers. A sandwich and the opportunity to rest your feet for an hour can be a draw on its own, not to mention the possibility of seeing something new that a vendor might be preparing to debut. Hopefully HIMSS will get its act together and make good on its agreements if indeed there’s a problem.

I’m always looking for a feel-good story, but unfortunately I ran across this one a few years too late. The Swedish Number was a campaign by the Swedish Tourist Association that allowed callers to dial Sweden and “get connected to a random Swede and talk about anything.” It was launched in 2016 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of a law to abolish censorship. It generated nearly 200,000 calls in the 79 days it was open. Callers from the USA were responsible for 32% of its volume. Swedes could register as ambassadors, and when calls came in, they were randomly routed to participants until someone answered.

It’s a great idea to generate interest in your country, and I like the idea of people just wanting to connect with someone in another part of the world. With all that we’ve collectively been through over the last three years, maybe it’s time for another feel-good moment. Which country wants to give it a go?

If you could call and talk to a random citizen of a given country, who would you want to talk to? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.