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EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/24/22

February 24, 2022 Dr. Jayne No Comments

Lots of activity on the HIMSS22 preparation front as people start to get serious about scheduling meetings, identifying sessions to attend, and attempting to draw people into their booths.

I’m often asked what would get me to come to a booth and look at a solution. First, I always remember that I’m primarily at HIMSS on behalf of my clients. It’s not just about the shoes and parties (and looking at HIMSS22, the schedule for the latter is decidedly lacking). I’m more apt to visit a booth for a vendor that has a potential solution to a client’s problems, or to a generalizable healthcare problem that’s important to me as a physician.

Second, companies need to consider the mechanics of how they let people know that they have a solution that might stimulate some interest. I at least eyeball the emails that come through from HIMSS vendors. If there’s a problem with the email formatting and the subject line doesn’t render correctly in the inbox, it goes straight to the trash. Marketing teams definitely need to be on top of testing this before they send their blast communications.

If the subject line seems compelling enough to open it, but I find formatting issues in the email itself (such as a poorly constructed salutation), it’s likely to go straight to the trash as well, since I find that highly annoying in addition to the fact that it conveys a message that a company isn’t attentive to detail. If they can’t manage the little things like formatting their communications, can I trust them with my clients’ outcomes? I understand that marketing is far from being considered a little thing and there’s a lot of complexity involved, but thousands of companies are able to do it right every day, so it can be done.

There used to be a lot of direct mailings to CMIOs in the weeks before HIMSS that included invitations from vendors to visit their booths and teased potential announcements. Some of the big spenders would even send goodies ahead of the meeting. Some would fall along the lines of “HIMSS survival kits,” including energy drinks and water bottles. Although eye-catching and fun, I’m not sure how much the average CMIO really used them or whether they thought they were a waste of money and postage.

I always liked hearing about the booths that were hosting events or activities to benefit a charity, such as “come by to stuff a backpack for a deserving school” or something similar. Those definitely got my attention because they were not only fun to do, but a good diversion from a long day at HIMSS.

Other mailings were a little kitschier, especially if the meeting was scheduled for Las Vegas. This includes vendor-branded casino chips to bring to the booth. I don’t know how many people actually carried those to the show, let alone took them to the booth, but I saw them year after year so they must have been effective, at least to some degree. Cards to bring for a drawing were also popular, and it’s been interesting to see how those drawings have evolved over the years. In 2011, it was IPad city, and I was lucky enough to bring one home. Over time, Fitbit devices became popular, then Bluetooth speakers, Apple watches, and more. I’ve seen a couple of vendors give away designer handbags, which is a fun twist. There was one company that gave away jet ski and one that gave away Vespa scooters. I’d definitely stop by to get a Vespa pic if someone offers one.

Mailings have definitely fallen off over the last several years. For HIMSS19, many of the mailings were late and were waiting for me when I returned home. Although HIMSS20 was a casualty of COVID, I received fewer than a dozen mailings. HIMSS21 brought less than a handful of postcards. I haven’t received any mailings this year, although it’s still early. I feel like physical mail is likely going to disappear, but would be interested to hear from any marketing professionals on whether they still feel there is a role for it. It’s certainly a differentiator if you’re one of the few vendors who does it and is likely to garner a little more attention than the flood of emails that we all receive.

In thinking about being actually at the show and what makes me want to visit a booth, my list is fairly well harmonized with what Mr. H publishes nearly every year. Friendly and engaged booth staff who are outward facing as people walk by makes the top of my list. Nothing says “we don’t want to talk to you” like being heads-down on your phone. Even the tiniest booths will get my attention if they look remotely interesting and the staff actively tries to engage clients. Hopefully the HIMSS badges will be printed this year in a way that booth staff can see our titles, because I think that helps a bit in the exhibit hall dance as well.

The booth needs to be clean and organized, with no clutter on tables and definitely no overflowing trash cans. If you have swag to give away, it needs to be organized and not look like a yard sale. Small tchotchkes that make the show easier are always appreciated – hand sanitizer, lip balm, Tylenol packets, etc. Little pieces of chocolate are always a fan favorite, especially if you need a pick me up after several hours of cruising the exhibits. I’m not a big fan of glossy paper take-aways simply because I don’t want to carry them around, not to mention the environmental impact of those. I might take a picture of materials to remind me of a vendor, so maybe having something that displays the vendor, its core offering, and its website in a way that can be easily captured would be useful.

Of course, I always make sure to visit the booths of our HIStalk sponsors and I’ve enjoyed seeing our signage over the years. I test drove my new HIMSS shoes last week so now all my boxes are checked and I’m ready to put my exhibit hall strategy together.

What are your plans for HIMSS22? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 2/21/22

February 21, 2022 Dr. Jayne 6 Comments

I’ve had a fair amount of work-related travel in the last few weeks and have noted the distinct lack of business travelers in the friendly skies. Others in the industry have noted the same, as companies have shifted away from in-person meetings in favor of ever-present videoconferencing software.

Airlines have been strapped for business during the pandemic and are trying to capture revenue from the pent-up demand of individuals wanting leisure and family travel. As a result, we’re seeing some overall changes in routes and schedules. We’re also seeing changes to flights after they’re already booked, which might be tolerated by leisure travelers, but which creates a mess for those of us traveling for work.

In the last week, I’ve received four flight change notifications that shift my departures or arrivals enough that I need to fly in a day early or stay a date later in order to meet the client’s meeting request. It feels like the days of being able to fly in and out of some cities on the same day are soon going to be over, if they’re not already. Even if the flight change notifications are acceptable, I’ve run into issues with airline websites not updating appropriately to allow travelers to update their Outlook calendars with the new flight information. It’s a small thing, but when you add up a number of annoyances, it definitely compounds.

With declining numbers of business travelers, the whole airline experience feels messier and more disorganized. I’ve been in several TSA PreCheck lines with people who don’t understand the process and start unpacking their laptops and liquids, which aggravates not only their fellow travelers, but the TSA agents, who seem a more aggravated than their baseline state. Boarding processes seem to take longer as people fumble with their phones and their overstuffed carry-on bags. People seem to be less attentive, probably more focused on their phones or music than on what’s happening around them.

I had to coach some newbie Southwest Airlines passengers through the fact that there aren’t any assigned seats on that carrier. Clearly, they missed the four different announcements that were made by various gate agents and flight attendants during the process and seemed upset that they didn’t have reserved seats. I’m guessing they didn’t make their own reservations since the lack of seat assignments is pretty obvious during the Southwest booking process.

I always joked about creating the all-business airline if I ever arrive at a position where I am insanely wealthy. I would pay more to fly with people who could board quickly, stow their luggage efficiently, and not act sassy to the flight crew. Being able to deplane quickly and move past the jetway exit without having to stop and adjust one’s overflowing open-top tote bag would also be a plus. After the things I’ve seen this week, I think zippers or some other mechanism of secure closure should be mandatory on all carry-on bags, but that would be asking a lot when we can’t even get people to exhibit civil behavior.

One of my flights this week almost had to go back to the gate due to a belligerent passenger who refused to wear his mask. Whether you agree with masking or not, thinking that you’re going to be able to bully a flight crew isn’t a good idea. Had we been forced to return to the gate, I think some of the passengers might have also considered taking justice into their own hands, given the number of short connections at the other end of this flight.

At least I’ve taken enough trips recently that I feel like I’ve got my travel mojo back and am back to my usual packing efficiency. I did somehow forget toothpaste on a flight earlier this month, but it was a good excuse to visit a local pharmacy and to also pick up some dark chocolate as well as the necessities. The workplaces I’ve visited are significantly more casual than they were pre-pandemic, with jeans being the norm at several places where we would have received glaring looks had we worn them before.

I’m working with a couple of companies that have embraced an outdoorsy vibe and I’m hoping for longer-term engagements where hiking pants can be a permanent part of my business travel wardrobe. I’ve had to make some adjustments in how many snacks I pack for a trip, though, because airport concession offerings remain significantly limited at most of the places I’ve been. My home airport still has half its restaurants and about a third of the newsstand shops closed, and you never know what you’re going to find when you arrive somewhere you haven’t been in a while.

For me, one of the biggest adjustments of traveling has been operating exclusively on my laptop. Over the last couple of years, I’ve apparently become spoiled by the setup in my home office, which includes not only a screaming-fast PC, but monitors that make me feel like I’m working at mission control rather than in a converted spare bedroom.

When I do have to do videoconference meetings with clients while I’m traveling, it’s a trick to balance the meeting software with any materials I might need to use while still being able to see the faces of the team I’m meeting with. I keep experimenting with different approaches and maybe something will stick, although it seems to be easier to get things the way I like them with Zoom than when I have to use Teams or GoToMeeting. I’d be interested to hear what usability experts think of the various conferencing software options – there are definitely some I like better than others, and of course a couple that I’d be happy never having to use again.

For those of you who are traveling again, what are the most striking changes you’re seeing with your clients and your travel patterns? Have you come up with new hacks that make things easier? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/17/22

February 17, 2022 Dr. Jayne No Comments

I enjoyed this short piece on “Overrated tech: 5 tools execs think hospitals should skip.” Suggestions given by health system executives include proprietary technology, augmented / virtual reality, applications written for on-premises use, and niche technology. Rounding out the list was the undead of business equipment: the fax machine. I’m always amazed when hospital or medical licensing forms want a fax number. No matter how hard we work to get away from them, the little machines soldier on.

If I had to add a couple of overrated technologies to the list, I’d suggest the following: freestanding patient portals that don’t integrate with the EHR, home monitoring devices that don’t have a neat and tidy way of sending data to the responsible physician, and emergency department wait-time displays on billboards and websites. If you have time to compare wait times, then it’s less likely that the emergency department is the right location for your care.

The new calendar year has set my continuing medical education counter back to zero, so I’ve been keeping an eye out for good online presentations that also deliver CME hours. Despite the fact many of us have been working virtually for years now, I still see quite a bit of bad behavior on webinars. You would think that with all our collective experience, people would have gotten better at being professional when on large group webinars. I’ve seen enough annoying habits that I could write a “tips and tricks” document. The highlight reel:

  • If you are a host or presenter and know you’re not going to allow verbal audience participation, please set up the webinar so that the audience is in listen-only mode. If you forget to do this, hopefully you know how to mute everyone. There will always be some person driving, making lunch, or taking their phone and the webinar to the restroom.
  • For audience members, pay attention to what the presenters say about fielding questions. If they ask you to put your questions in the Q&A area as opposed to in the chat, please do so. As someone who runs a lot of webinars, it’s hard to manage multiple streams, so usually we pick one way to handle things. Our organization’s policies might keep us from locking down the other functionality or hiding it from you, but you’ll get a better response if you do as the presenter asks.
  • Also for hosts, the whole idea of “we’re going to start about five minutes late to allow people time to join” is extremely disrespectful to those who were prepared and on time. Although you might think you’re doing us a favor and telling us that so we can multi-task for a few minutes, the reality is that a good chunk of your audience is aggravated by it, while another chunk will delve into email or texting and you won’t get them fully back when it’s actually time. If everyone started on time, maybe latecomers would learn a lesson.

Speaking of pushing deadlines, HIMSS has extended the registration discount for HIMSS22 through February 22, citing organizational budget and travel permission issues. I know a number of organizations that are still under no-travel restrictions. Although COVID cases are easing, hospital staffing is still a struggle. Teams are exhausted and there’s often no hope for replenishing the bench. I think leaders are increasingly aware of the optics of jetting off to Orlando while their teams are still underwater.

HIMSS also notes they are adding programming and speakers, including sessions on aging and loneliness, policy updates, and international perspectives. I’m not sure that the addition of those topics would make me want to go if I hadn’t already booked, so it also feels like a “registrations are low, let’s see how many other people we can drag through the door” type maneuver.

HIMSS also continues to send emails trying to get attendees to sign up for events that require additional fees, such as the Women in Health IT Networking Reception. It costs $55 for a 90-minute event, which despite the advertising, doesn’t seem like enough time to “share stories, recognize and celebrate your peers, and form valuable connections that will last a lifetime.” Maybe I’ll engineer my schedule to eyeball the event during peak entry and exit times, though – I’m sure there will be some outstanding shoes to be seen.

Thinking about these events makes me wish Mr. H would reconsider the idea of throwing an HIStalk kegger in some parking lot. There’s an undeveloped lot across the street from my hotel that would be perfect. That would be a real way to make memories that would last a lifetime, I’m sure.

A lot of my work as a CMIO revolves around using EHRs and related technologies, such as clinical decision support, to reduce variability in patient care. A recent piece looked at how physicians within a single health system often make different treatment choices for identical patient scenarios. Certain physicians were much more likely to use recommended standards of care than their peers, which can be concerning if not following the standards leads to variability that worsens outcomes.

The authors looked at 14 “straightforward” clinical scenarios (as opposed to complex cases) to score physician performance. Some of the scenarios looked at surgical procedures, where the top surgeons opted for non-surgical interventions at greater rates than their low-performing peers. This supports the idea that wasteful spending is often tied to inappropriate care. It will be interesting to see how hospitals respond to this since they make a good amount of money from the questionable surgical procedures compared to the non-surgical interventions.

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An intrepid reader sent me this picture from a healthcare facility that should remain nameless. It looks like they’re having an issue with their emergency call system, so they hit the Home Depot and stocked up on stick-on doorbells. The handwritten label is a nice touch. I’m not sure what The Joint Commission or any other accrediting body would think of the solution, but it does have a certain resourcefulness to it.

What kind of entertaining solutions have you seen when your organization just needs to make do? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 2/14/22

February 14, 2022 Dr. Jayne No Comments

I started the HIMSS22 vaccine verification process today, and we’ll have to see if it works this time. Last year, when I still planned to attend the event in person, I started the process and never received conformation that my vaccine submission had been validated. The current process includes uploads of both a government-issued ID and the vaccine card. I tried using my passport this time to see if it works any better than my driver’s license did last year.

The emails I’m receiving from HIMSS22 vendors have started to increase in frequency, but I have yet to see a marketing campaign that really stands out. I’m trying to do a little planning every day so I can stay ahead of the game and avoid a flurry of organizing at the end.

This weekend’s hot topic in the virtual clinical informatics physician lounge is a petition to extend the so-called “practice pathway” for board certification in clinical informatics. The practice pathway, which is scheduled to expire in 2022, allows a certification mechanism for those of us who didn’t complete formal fellowships in clinical informatics. To be eligible for certification, physicians must demonstrate three years of practice in the field, with at least 25% of professional time in informatics. Physicians can also be eligible if they complete a 24-month master’s or PhD program in biomedical informatics, health sciences informatics, clinical informatics, or a related subject.

A number of clinical informaticists are supportive of extending the practice pathway, particularly due to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. They note issues with the availability of residency and fellowship rotations that disrupted the ability of participants to complete their programs. Proponents cite a shortage of certified informaticists and the expected need for roles in thousands of hospitals and clinics. They also note the large number of physicians who have been practicing clinical informatics but who might not have the time or financial resources to pursue a fellowship. Others are concerned about the ability of fellowship programs to ramp up enough to be able to train the numbers of informaticists required to staff the workforce.

Others are opposed to leaving the practice pathway open. Some feel that the option hurts fellowships, leading to decreased applications and filled positions. Personally, I think the low salaries paid to fellows are at least partially responsible for decreased applications, not to mention the disruption to your career if you’re already practicing in the field. There is also concern that the practice pathway creates a lower standard. In my experience employing clinical informaticists, I’m not sure the board certification really makes a difference. It’s more of a check-the-box formality for some, but I’m perfectly happy hiring a seasoned informaticist who can do the job that needs to be done regardless of their certification status.

I obtained my certification through the practice pathway, having practiced clinical informatics exclusively in the seven years prior to certification. At that point in my career, there was no chance that I would consider leaving an EHR implementation at a major health system to complete academic pursuits. I used the Board’s content outline to craft a study plan and spent nearly six months reading more than a dozen college-level textbooks to prepare for the exam. Other than some specific and highly technical questions, the majority of the board examination involved topics that I dealt with on a daily basis in my informatics practice. One physician commenting on the issue noted that as data experts, we should be looking for proof that there are differences in outcomes when clinical informaticists are certified through the practice pathway versus through the fellowship pathway.

Board certification is a hot topic for physicians in general. Most boards require physicians to participation in a process called Maintenance of Certification. Depending on the board, physicians have to participate in continuing medical education, complete performance improvement projects, document evidence of professionalism, and complete a demonstration of knowledge. Those knowledge demonstrations vary. Some still require the traditional high-stakes examinations, and others allow longitudinal assessments. Most physicians aren’t interested in cramming for a high-stakes exam, especially when we’re tested over content that is no longer part of our daily practice. There is no immediate feedback on questions that are missed and it’s a generally miserable experience.

The last time I took one of those exams, I had a pat-down by the testing center employees and was treated like a criminal before even entering the testing room. There have been recent reports of physicians who were treated poorly at testing centers, including one lactating physician who was offered “accommodations” for pumping that failed to include a private area, a table or counter, or even an electrical outlet for the pump. She was forced to pump in a bathroom stall and the time spent counted against her limited exam breaks. I can’t imagine the mount of stress that added to the situation.

Specialty boards are trying to update their Maintenance of Certification processes to make them less onerous for physicians. However, there isn’t evidence that participating in the process makes physicians better at their jobs. I agree that for those of us participating in the longitudinal assessments, the process helps physicians become more proficient at finding information they don’t know.

Since I’ve been in urgent care for the last decade, I can handle most of the board questions that cover the musculoskeletal, digestive, and respiratory systems without blinking. Trauma is also a slam dunk and I’m solid with dermatology, infectious disease, and psychiatry. For maternity care, which I haven’t practiced in a very long time, I end up resorting to reference materials to handle those questions, just like I consult with practicing maternal care physicians in real life. Hopefully, the process is teaching physicians how to find information when they don’t know it off the tops of their heads, and to do so efficiently. However, it sometimes just feels like a game that we have to play.

Has there been any chatter about clinical informatics board certification in your organization? Are you for or against extending the practice pathway? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/10/22

February 10, 2022 Dr. Jayne 1 Comment

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released details on the status of Accountable Care Organizations. CMS promotes the fact that 66 new ACOs joined the program and 140 renewed their agreements, bringing the total number of programs to 483. Looking at historical data, however, that’s small growth (six programs) since last year, but an overall decrease since 2020’s count of 517 programs. Doing the math, that means 60 organizations left the program.

In speaking with colleagues who are closer to the ACO world, even when ACOs don’t renew, it is likely that upwards of 50% of clinicians will move into a different ACO. That’s good news for patients who value continuity. The overall ACO initiative has a long way to go to meet its goals of providing coverage for the majority of Medicare beneficiaries in the US. It will be interesting to see how the program continues to evolve and how quickly it can build that kind of coverage.

Telehealth is hot in the news this week. The first story involves telehealth gone bad, with a Georgia nurse practitioner being found guilty of $3 million in fraudulent activities. Charges include healthcare fraud, identity theft, illegal kickbacks, and false statements. The Operation Brace Yourself sting operation targeted providers who were unnecessarily ordering durable medical equipment for patients they had never evaluated. The criminal conspiracy involved targeting senior citizens through telemarketing, then using their personal information to submit claims for orthotic braces. The convicted nurse practitioner signed over 3,000 orders related to falsified medical records in exchange for money. Despite what was said in the 1990s, greed is NOT good.

Amazon’s telehealth efforts were also in the news as it announced plans to expand Amazon Care’s in-person services to more than 20 new cities this year. Its virtual services are already available across the country. Amazon’s blurb says, “Care Medical doctors and nurses across the country are dedicated to treating Amazon Care customers, so patients are able to build lasting relationships with their health care providers over time.” Hopefully, Amazon’s model for employing physicians and nurses is more flexible and rewarding than some of the employment practices we hear about at Amazon’s warehouse and delivery operations. Keeping patients happy over time involves keeping their care teams happy over time, which is a difficult nut that healthcare organizations have struggled to crack for decades.

Anthem also announced its plans for virtual primary care services for its members in 11 states. The virtual offering includes an initial health check with creation of a personalized care plan and is being offered at little or no cost to members. Anthem talks about delivering services through its Sydney health app, which can handle secure chat for urgent care as well as support for scheduling. However, it’s unclear how its offering will integrate with patients’ existing medical records or care providers such as subspecialists. Both Anthem and Amazon seem to be targeting employer-sponsored plans. Since employers have a vested interest in trying to reduce healthcare spending, it will be interesting to see what adoption of these programs looks like.

I serve on the health advisory committee for my local school board. We had an interesting conversation this week about the role of testing in the current phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the explosion in at-home testing and the fact that those tests are generally not reported to public health authorities, overall testing numbers and positivity rates are becoming skewed. My colleagues in public health informatics have already struggled with the knowledge that we’ve been underreporting cases throughout the pandemic, and the boom in home-based testing isn’t helping. Local schools have been looking at positivity rates to determine whether to hold classes in-person and whether to require masks and those decisions have become more complicated. We’re starting to talk about using percentage of vaccination as another indicator, but it’s difficult to get people to self-report their vaccination status. The last couple of years have been agonizing for educators and I don’t envy the decisions they have to make on a daily basis.

We’re also seeing a boom in patients who think they might have COVID but don’t want to be tested because they can’t afford to be off of work. This also applies to people who don’t want their children tested because they don’t have backup childcare options if the students have to be kept out of school. This also creates decision-making challenges and was on my mind when I read a recent JAMA article looking at the number of adults who thought they had COVID-19 but actually didn’t. About half of unvaccinated adults who thought they had been infected were found not to have antibodies, which are expected to be present at least at some level for about nine months after an infection. Conversely, 99% of people who had a test-confirmed infection had antibodies. Of note, 11% of people who thought they had never been infected had antibodies. The data is from pre-Omicron days, so I will be interested to see what it looks like after the current wave.

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Working from home has certainly given me more time for pastry therapy. Now that many of us have been fully remote workers for a couple of years, it’s interesting to think back about how things used to be. We’ve all become used to some of the quirks of this new normal, from sharing broader views of our colleagues’ home lives to joining them in the carpool line as they pick up children from school. It’s been interesting to see how some organizations have evolved to new ways of working, with guidelines around whether meetings have to be video or whether they can be audio only, etc. Some have policies about how/when to use phone versus collaboration solutions versus email. Some organizations have become casual and free form with meetings, where others observe more formal meeting disciplines.

I ran across a situation the other day that I hadn’t encountered. I was on a client call with my normal working group and we were just doing our thing. Out of nowhere, someone joined the meeting, and although initially I thought they were a Zoom-bomber, I noticed they had a company logo on their pullover. Since I wasn’t the facilitator or the host, merely a member of the working group, I didn’t say anything. I figured I would wait to see how long it took for them to introduce themselves or for someone else on the call to say something. We weren’t discussing anything sensitive or proprietary, so I felt comfortable waiting. A full 38 minutes later, the meeting ended, and I never did figure out the identity of the mystery person other than their name caption. I’m still surprised that no one said anything, but that kind of thing is what makes being a consultant interesting.

What do you do when random people show up in your meetings? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 2/7/22

February 7, 2022 Dr. Jayne No Comments

As a consulting clinical informaticist, one of the things I’m often tasked with is EHR optimization. Sometimes clients have robust structures for receiving feedback from clinical users as well as teams who are tasked with assessing workflows and recommending changes. In those situations, I might provide clinical input as they work through issues, getting proposed changes polished before we take them out to stakeholders for feedback. That’s a lot of fun, because the end users appreciate having a fully vetted solution presented to them versus having to be involved in the details of process.

Other times, clients need someone to help them create a structure to handle feedback and recommend solutions. Those projects are also rewarding because users really like feeling like they’re being heard and that someone cares, even if the process you’re creating is just getting started.

One of the hot topics in optimization right now is figuring out how to lighten physician documentation requirements. It’s been a year since the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services modified the Evaluation & Management coding requirements with the goal of simplifying documentation. Many clinicians thought the changes were too good to be true and I don’t blame them. Coming from a large health system background, I felt that the years of internal compliance audits had created a certain level of fear around under-documenting or over-coding. We had been conditioned to make sure we were documenting more than enough Review of Systems and Physical Exam checkboxes just to be on the safe side. This was made more complex when one needed to document an element that could be counted in two different systems, and most of the physicians I know had come to dread any conversation around coding.

Now that there has been some flexibility, and people have learned that auditors aren’t waiting around every corner to catch someone who isn’t documenting correctly, physicians are eagerly pushing their organizations to remove the excessive clicking that physicians and their support staff members have been complaining about for years. As people have reassessed their priorities during the pandemic, clinical users have been increasingly vocal about how much they feel technology is contributing to burnout. With staffing levels as dire as they are in some organizations, those organizations have figured out that they can’t afford to not listen to what their employees are saying. Those organizations who have consciously looked at how their users work have also figured out that so-called “note bloat” makes it harder to care for patients since notes that contain extraneous information make it harder to find the data elements that are important.

Physicians and other users who had created extensive macros to satisfy the previous E&M requirements are now spending time trimming down the content of those macros to better reflect what they do in a typical patient visit. Adjusting those configurations takes time, and end-users are eager to have an analyst or super user make the changes whenever possible. Depending on the EHR, the effort needed to do this can range from straightforward to cumbersome. Not surprisingly, I see more progress on “easy” systems than I do on those that require greater involvement of IT or other teams. Sometimes the level of difficulty to make a change is murky, though. The fact that I’ve worked in so many different EHRs is certainly an advantage when analysts push back and try to make it seem like it’s more complicated to make a change than it really is.

I also see more physicians who are using time-based coding since figuring out how to document that has become a bit easier. In the past, you had to keep track of how much of the visit was face-to-face, how much was counseling and coordination of care, etc. Now the majority of elements performed by a provider on the day of service count, making it much more likely that a physician might choose to code based on the duration of effort. This has led to greater number of high-level visits being coded by physician. Although one would think this should lead to greater pay for physicians, I’ve seen a number of organizations figure out ways to avoid paying their clinicians more. Some have made adjustments to keep physician salaries relatively flat, keeping a greater portion of the payments for the organization versus passing them on to the people doing the work.

When I hear that the latter is happening, I try to push optimization as much as possible in order to ensure the end users feel some relief. Even if they’re not receiving better compensation, I can hopefully make their days at least a little bit shorter and their visits a little easier.

There have been a couple of times recently when I’ve felt really torn when working on an optimization project. I’ve gotten a sense that administrators will perceive that the physicians are doing less work, will translate this to a perception that the physicians have greater capacity, and then continue to shift work towards them. We saw a great shift of low-level clinical work to physicians at the beginning of the Meaningful Use program, and physicians had to fight hard to get organizations to agree that they needed their support staff to take on some of this work. The idea of working at the top of your license could be used to show that physicians were expensive, and if you had more staff, you could see more patients and those changes were revenue neutral or even positive.

Now that there is such a labor shortage, finding capable staff at a price organizations and administrators are willing to pay can be tricky. Not surprisingly, physicians have filled the gap because it’s the right thing to do for their patients, but it’s hard to convince decision makers to look for unicorn-like staff members in this market when they know the physicians will do the work for free. No amount of optimization is going to improve clinician morale if they feel like they’re being pulled into a black hole of ongoing work with no help in sight. I’m interested in understanding how large organizations have optimized their systems based on the changes to the Evaluation & Management codes.

Are your ambulatory physicians writing the shortest notes of their careers with the same billing codes? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/3/22

February 3, 2022 Dr. Jayne No Comments

For many companies, HIMSS preparation is in full swing, if my inbox is any indicator of the situation. Multiple marketing people have reached out inviting me to visit their booths for demos or conversation. I must say that the invites for happy hour appetizer and beverage events seem to be lacking, so I’m wondering if HIMSS is clamping down on food and beverage service in the exhibit hall due to COVID. If that’s the case, I’ll definitely be missing the scones.

As for booth invitations, I’m more likely to respond if a company has a compelling pitch and understands that I have to visit them anonymously versus trying to get me to make an appointment, since that undermines the whole anonymous blogger vibe. No invites for after-hours events yet, so I’m not sure how this year’s social scene is shaping up just yet.

For frontline physicians, the creation of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) brought to life key pieces of technology that made a tremendous difference in patient care. I keep receiving emails from my local PDMP, asking me to approve delegate requests for nurse practitioners and physician assistants that I worked with at my former practice. Our state won’t allow non-physician providers to have an account unless they’re sponsored by a physician, which in many cases was me. There has been a lot of turnover in the physician ranks and apparently some of the new supervising physicians either don’t have PDMP accounts and therefore can’t delegate to the midlevel providers, or somehow don’t think it’s important for the providers they supervise to be able to look for patterns of controlled substance abuse or diversion. This has been going on for more than eight months, and I feel bad for the providers who don’t have access to this vital information. It’s yet another illustration why a patchwork of state laws isn’t always the best thing for patient care. On the other hand, it’s also a pretty telling commentary on the leadership of my former practice, who could solve the problem by requiring that everyone makes use of the PDMP and that appropriate operational structures are in place to support the effort.

From Jimmy the Greek: “Re: this week’s Snowmageddon. I’m tired of seeing organizations talk about their ‘inclimate’ weather” preparations. Spelling counts. Take a look at this email – not only is the inclimate weather virus spreading, but now I have contact information for 200+ patients.” Jimmy forwarded me an email from his local physical therapy provider, who apparently doesn’t understand patient privacy or how to use blind carbon copy functionality on an email. The body of the email made it clear that the addressees were patients with appointments scheduled today or tomorrow and also mentioned that they’d be contacted to reschedule. I hope Jimmy gives them an earful when he receives his call.

Hot on the heels of my weekend piece about healthcare organizations that aren’t giving their employees time to recover from illness and injury, I’m mentoring young physician informaticist who emailed with some questions about professionalism. He was on a training call with one of his organization’s tech vendors. The lead presenter seemed tired and out of it, and about 20 minutes into the call, admitted that he was COVID-positive and was having a difficult time focusing and asked if they could take a break so he could hand off to his backup. As a physician, my friend was surprised that someone who was obviously symptomatic would be working, especially in a non-essential role. From a business perspective, he was surprised that the vendor hadn’t asked to reschedule the call, or that they didn’t start the session with the backup presenter in the first place.

Even with people working remotely, if they’re not well enough to work, they shouldn’t be working. In this situation the presenter knew well enough that they weren’t 100% that they arranged for a backup presenter. This situation speaks not only to poor individual judgment (which I guess you could probably attribute to COVID-induced brain fog), but potentially to corporate policies that push people to work even when they shouldn’t.

My young colleague was wondering about what he should have done if there hadn’t been a backup presenter. Should he have called a stop to the presentation after realizing the presenter was in some distress? He was also questioning whether he should say something to others at the vendor about what had happened. I think compassion dictates asking a struggling presenter if they need a moment, and if they don’t realize there’s an issue, then I’d probably ask them if we could reschedule. It’s difficult where a medical condition is concerned and one doesn’t want to pry or appear inappropriate pointing out that things aren’t going well, so I’m not sure if there’s a great answer here.

This ties in nicely to an article I read about the CDC’s recent update to workplace guidelines for COVID-positive healthcare personnel. Although many assume those roles are largely occupied by physicians, nurses, therapists, and others who are performing hands-on patient care, the CDC guidance also includes “persons not directly involved in patient care, but who could be exposed to infectious agents that can be transmitted in the healthcare setting,” including administrative and billing personnel. This also may include a lot of healthcare IT workers depending on their roles. Many healthcare workers who aren’t in the weeds on the recommendations might not realize that work restrictions for healthcare personnel are broken into three categories:

  • Conventional standard. Those with COVID-19 should be restricted from the workplace for 10 days or for seven days with a negative test – assuming asymptomatic, mild, or moderate illness with improving symptoms. Many organizations interpret conventional as applying when there is adequate staff or personnel are non-essential.
  • Contingency standard. Those with COVID-19 may return after five days if asymptomatic, mild, or moderate illness with improving symptoms.
  • Crisis standard. There are no work restrictions, but there may be prioritization considerations, such as having COVID-positive staff only work with COVID-positive patients.

We’re starting to come down from crisis standards of care to contingency in some parts of the country, and in others, it may be time to see a change from contingency to conventional standards. Regardless of the definition, if people aren’t able to perform the essential functions of their job, they shouldn’t be working. We need to stand up for each other when we see someone in the workplace who probably shouldn’t be.

How would you handle someone who is obviously too sick to work? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 1/31/22

January 31, 2022 Dr. Jayne 1 Comment

A physician friend has been waiting patiently to have a surgical procedure, which has been cancelled multiple times due to COVID. The first time it was due to the rapidly rising omicron peak, and the second time due to overall staffing challenges.

She has been patiently dealing with the delays despite the fact that she’s in a great deal of pain, and also despite the disruptions it’s causing to her practice, when she had to cancel and reschedule six weeks’ worth of patient visits, only to have to try to get them back on her schedule after the procedure gets canceled. Her patients love her and have been accommodating, but now that some of them have been through the cycle twice, I’m sure their patience is wearing thin.

In addition to moving her work schedule, she’s had to rearrange the schedules of others who had planned to come stay with her post-op, rearrange planned meal deliveries, rearrange delivery of durable medical equipment, and more. People who don’t understand what goes into procedure scheduling might not understand all the dominoes that fall when there’s a change to what should be a standardized process. Labor shortages in healthcare continue to be an issue, and she’s hoping the surgery goes ahead this week as planned so she can start recovering and getting back to the things she liked to do before her injury.

Her experience has made her more aware of what’s going on in her health system and how both individuals and the organization are responding to those who need to take medical leave. From talking to others in similar positions, it’s a reflection on what’s happening in the workplace as a whole, and why so many people are choosing to be part of the Great Resignation that’s under way.

When she first tried to schedule surgery, she had immense push-back from her department. It sounded out of proportion given that she’s a 20+ year employee who has never taken more than her usual accrued vacation time – no family leaves, no medical leaves, no bereavement leave.

Even though it’s not department policy, her department chair expected her to make up her on-call days, and went as far as to tell her she should double-up on call before she goes out (despite the fact that she is already having difficulty doing her very physical job due to her injury). She had to check her contract and threaten to get an attorney involved before they backed down. The contract clearly says that she’s not on the hook for call that she can’t take during a time of disability or incapacity. Her department is large, and she’s certainly done enough coverage for her colleagues for their various leaves over the years, so I encouraged her to not feel guilty about taking the time she needs to recover.

One colleague went to far as to tell her that since they can do some visits via telemedicine, she shouldn’t take a medical leave and should just work remotely and cover her own inbox and messages. I guess that colleague thinks it’s OK to practice medicine while taking post-operative opioid pain medications. Apparently, they also missed the part in medical school where we’re supposed to understand that patients need to rest and recover for optimal healing.

We were chatting about this on a virtual happy hour with a couple of other physicians when another friend mentioned that her hospital-owned group had told women who were on maternity leave that they had the option of coming in to see hospital consultations that had been requested. The administrators felt those visits were quick and shouldn’t take too much time each day. I thought she was kidding until she shared her screen on Zoom and showed the proof. They weren’t even subtle about the fact that they were addressing women only. Maybe that was a rogue manager, but even so, their boss should be all over them.

That certainly seems contrary to all the messaging that healthcare providers are getting from their administrators about the need to practice self-care and build resilience. I guess those suggestions only go so far until they interfere with the hospital’s ability to move patients through the system, and at that point, self-care (or care for an infant) isn’t important.

I’m not a labor attorney, but it feels like trying to coerce someone who is on family or medical leave into performing work probably isn’t the right thing to do, regardless of what your human resources department might have suggested. Those kinds of behaviors aren’t the kind of thing that makes an organization the employer of choice in a tight labor market, either.

As physicians, we’re wired to do our best to help our patients, but I hope that physicians and other clinicians continue to just say no when those suggestions are made. I don’t think having a sleep-deprived parent who would rather be home with their newborn leads to the highest quality care. Nor does having a clinician who is in a rush to get home before their childcare resource has to leave. There are plenty of studies that show that at a certain level of sleep deprivation that people are as cognitively impaired as they would be if they were under the influence of alcohol.

If this level of pressure is being applied to physicians who have a high level of education, autonomy, financial resources, and insight, it makes me wonder what strategies administrators might be using on staff members who might have less understanding of their rights or who are more afraid to push back.

What makes this even more shocking is how starkly it contrasts with what I’m seeing in other parts of the industry, where companies pride themselves on their culture and on making sure their employees feel valued. Being able to recover properly after surgery shouldn’t be a boutique ask from a culture-centric employer, it should be a basic human right. Similarly, being able to take one’s federally protected family or medical leave shouldn’t involve coercion, pressure, or the guilt treatment.

It will be interesting to see whether these organizations figure out that their tactics are counterproductive, or whether they continue to run their workforce into the ground.

Have you seen any unusual HR tactics during the labor shortage? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 1/27/22

January 27, 2022 Dr. Jayne 1 Comment

ECRI has released its 2022 list of Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for hospitals, medical practices, and home health organizations. Cyberattacks are at the top and no one should be surprised by some of the others on the list: supply chain limitations, insufficient emergency stockpiles, and issues with disposable gowns and inadequate barrier protection. The fact that we’re still dealing with some of these issues in Year Three of the pandemic is a travesty. My local nurse friends keep me apprised of the personal protective equipment situations at their various hospitals. At one hospital, it has only been in the last two weeks that there have been enough N95 respirators available so that medical/surgical nurses can have a fresh respirator every shift. Previously, they were limited to one per month. One can’t help but wonder whether the fact that so many nurses were out with COVID infections played a role in opening the supply cabinets.

Nearly every industry has been impacted by the labor shortage, and healthcare is no exception. An article published at the end of 2021 in Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Innovation, Quality & Outcomes looked at “COVID-Related Stress and Work Intentions in a Sample of U.S. Health Care Workers.” The study looked at 20,000 workers across more than 120 organizations, surveying them between July and December 2020. The authors found that burnout, increased workloads, and concern about infection were associated with plans to reduce work hours or leave the field entirely. The presence of anxiety or depression were also associated with those plans, as was a higher number of years in practice. Nurses had the highest intention to reduce work hours followed by physicians and advanced practice providers. Surprisingly, administrators had the lowest intention to reduce hours.

I was in a conversation recently with early career physicians who were contemplating changes to their workloads. Both women and men in the discussion were eager to learn more about nontraditional practice opportunities including job share arrangements or part time work. Considering the physicians I’ve worked with over the years, the proportion of physicians who view medicine as a calling and who are willing to make great sacrifices for their careers is shrinking. While some view this as an erosion of professionalism, others view it as a healthy acceptance of reality by people who are navigating challenges that previous generations could not have envisioned.

Based on the survey results, nearly one-third of physicians, advanced practice providers, and nurses intended to reduce their work hours. Ten percent of physicians and 20% of nurses intended to leave practice entirely. The authors note that feeling valued by the organization was protective, lowering both the intention to reduce hours and the intention to leave. They conclude that additional research is needed to determine whether mitigation strategies can prevent a healthcare workforce crisis. In speaking to physician and nurse colleagues alike, many are looking for tangible changes to improve working environments. These include improvements to staffing ratios, expanded access to employer-sponsored childcare, and protection from workplace violence. It would benefit administrators to work on these issues in depth rather than continuing with their ineffective strategy of pizza parties and challenge coins.

Maybe they can take advantage of the $103 million that the Department of Health and Human Services has allocated to reduce healthcare worker burnout. The funds are part of the American Rescue Plan and will be granted to organizations serving providers in underserved and rural areas. Over $28 million will go to programs to promote mental health and well-being, $68 million will go towards burnout reduction and resilience, and the remaining $6 million will be used to create the Health and Public Safety Workforce Resiliency Technical Assistance Center. Most of the burned-out healthcare workers I know are tired of hearing the word resilience, so maybe they can think of something else to call the Center.

In telehealth news this week, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ended efforts by telehealth provider RemoteICU to obtain Medicare coverage for services rendered by virtualist physicians outside the US. The company had alleged that an emergency rule allowing Medicare to pay for critical care services via telehealth extended to physicians outside the US. The judicial panel stated that RemoteICU “failed to present its challenge in the context of a specific administrative claim for reimbursement of services” and failed to meet the criteria laid out for judicial review of Medicare claims. As always, the devil is in the details where Medicare is concerned.

I had several people reach out to me regarding the EHR performance issues I wrote about earlier this week. I checked in with my colleague this afternoon to see how things were going after his vendor’s interventions. Despite the changes, the organization continued to have issues with sluggish chart loads and delays in rendering various screens, but it seemed better overall. A couple of times a day, the system would come to a screeching halt, though. With additional eyes on the issue, they identified a potential cause they hadn’t captured previously. Because of changes in childcare schedules, a worker who typically handles billing processes at night had been working during the day. She had no idea that the processes she was running were resource-intensive since she had always worked nights and no one had ever mentioned it. Her supervisor was similarly unaware, working during the daytime.

Once that was addressed, performance stabilized, and although the crushing delays had stopped, the system was still slower than was ideal. Average chart load time was improved by about 50%, though, so the users were borderline ecstatic per his report. The performance team has continued to make various adjustments in an attempt to improve things further, but they’re trying not to make too many changes at once, which is prudent given everything the organization has been through. I wonder what they’re doing for the rest of their clients who might also be struggling with volume-related challenges, and whether the improvements made for this organization will be propagated to others proactively or only when things become dire.

Is your technology team proactive or reactive? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 1/24/22

January 24, 2022 Dr. Jayne 4 Comments

Many healthcare organizations are struggling with the recent COVID surge due to the omicron variant. The focus is often on staffing issues, especially when large numbers of workers are out due to personal illness, caring for sick family members, or providing care for children whose schools have shifted to virtual learning. Other struggles include supply shortages, especially with personal protective equipment, medications and therapeutics, and occasionally cleaning products, all of which are shocking at this stage of the pandemic.

More recently, though, a number of organizations are seeing infrastructure challenges due to the sheer number of patient visits that are occurring.

I spent some time over the weekend trying to calm a CMIO friend whose ambulatory organization is in complete crisis. In the past, they had a robust IT department and hosted all of their own applications. In a round of cost cutting, the parent organization decided it would be better to outsource all of those functions. At the same time, they moved many of their internally hosted systems onto web-based platforms where available.

Their primary ambulatory EHR was one of those systems. It wasn’t just moved out of their data center — it was also transitioned to a SaaS model with multi-tenant architecture. This was fine for a number of months, but recently their system has been grinding to a halt at various times during the course of a day, and the user community is becoming increasingly frustrated.

Many of their outpatient clinical offices are back to pre-COVID productivity, through a combination of in-person and virtual visits. Because this organization is conservative, its conducts all of its telehealth visits by video, which take up more bandwidth than an audio-only visit. Their urgent care and same-day facilities have been seeing high volumes throughout the pandemic, but they have been fairly stable numbers for the last few months since operational leaders wisely capped daily volumes in order to preserve staff sanity.

I’m sure they have lost some patients to other facilities in town, but they consider the leakage acceptable if it keeps staff from resigning. They made these decisions based on experiences from earlier in the pandemic when they didn’t cap volumes, which led to some pretty significant burnout and nearly insurmountable levels of turnover. They weren’t about to put their newly rebuilt staff through the same experience, and for that I commend them.

Still, they were puzzled why they were having such poor system performance with stable volumes. As a hosted client, the IT team was opening performance tickets left and right, but with few answers. System latency continued to increase along with user frustration, as it was taking up to 30 seconds to load patient charts or 20 seconds to navigate from screen to screen. Even basic controls such as pick lists and pop-ups were also sluggish. Performance would improve at times and they would feel like they were moving in the right direction. The urgent care locations, which run seven days a week, reported some slight improvement on the weekends, but not much.

After many conversations with the vendor and a number of executive escalations, it became clear that the way the vendor’s system is architected is the problem. After moving from their own data center onto the SaaS model, the group is experiencing lags related to the out-of-control visit volumes other clients. They are feeling performance impacts that are caused by organizations who had doubled or tripled their daily visit volumes, putting additional load on the infrastructure. Since many of us didn’t anticipate how quickly the COVID curve would climb with the omicron variant, and how many people would be sickened in such a short interval, planning for such volume surges was inadequate.

Sometimes solving infrastructure problems can be as challenging as solving staffing problems in the hospital. Especially if the system is already running towards the higher end of capacity, there might not be available hardware that can be incorporated quickly. In the crisis situations that many 24×7 organizations are working in, it’s not easy to schedule a downtime for an upgrade or to modify resources. A lot of things can be done behind the scenes, but the reality is that most of us never planned for a peak that looks like what we are experiencing.

I can’t imagine what the staff at these doubly- or triply-busy practices are going through. They have got to be at wits’ end, because increasing throughput to that degree requires more staff, better processes, or less care being delivered. Based on what we know staffing looks like, and the difficulty in doing significant process changes during a crisis, I’m guessing care might be taking a hit. That would certainly mesh with the discussions I’m seeing on physician-only social media, where the number of mentions of moral injury has climbed along with the number of posts in which physicians are asking for advice on how to break their contracts.

My CMIO friend’s vendor was supposed to try to some maneuvers over the weekend that would create relative isolation for his organization so that they wouldn’t be so dramatically impacted by what is going on with other clients. I’m trying to wrap my head around what their architecture might look like to make that happen. It makes me grateful for all the deeply techy people I’ve worked with over the years who understand better than I how those pieces of the healthcare IT world run.

I wouldn’t want to be on the tip of the spear, whether it was my fault or my vendor’s, because an angry end user is an angry end user regardless of where the root cause of the problem lies. Regardless, I can offer a sympathetic ear, a soft virtual shoulder, and reassurance that his communication strategy was solid and that he had considered all of the things that I would have considered were I in the same unenviable position. He’s going to let me know mid-week how things are going, and for his sake, I hope they’ are improved.

Have you encountered infrastructure challenges related to booming visit volumes? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 1/20/22

January 20, 2022 Dr. Jayne No Comments

I’m getting ready for HIMSS in earnest, beginning to schedule meetings and the much-anticipated booth crawls with some of my BFFs. It’s always good to have a support team to help you spot eye-catching products, interesting giveaways, and of course the finest footwear.

Several people have asked me what I think will happen with exhibitors and whether people will drop out. At this point, I think I have as good a chance of predicting that as my old-school Magic 8-Ball. In looking at the vendor-side organizations I’ve had involvement with over the last couple of years, the breakdown is 10% not attending, 25% going stealth (will not have a booth but will attend the show and have private meetings), 15% exhibiting but might cancel or send a smaller team, and 50% forging ahead business as usual.

One of the things I’m most looking forward to is seeing people in person who I haven’t seen since HIMSS19. Although I attended virtually in 2020, that experience paled in comparison to the past. Friends humored me with lots of after-hours pictures and shenanigans, but I’ll be glad to be part of the adventure again.

Of course, that assumes that we don’t have another variant of concern pop up between now and then. It’s hard to believe we had no idea that omicron was going to be such a nightmare a couple of months ago. Here’s to hoping that given all the people who have been infected, the immunity it provides will be at least somewhat durable. It’s likely we won’t know that for quite some time, but I’m still hopeful. If it turns out that all the death and suffering and healthcare workers’ exhaustion of the last few months were for nothing, that’s going to make it all the more terrible.

I’m part of an online group that discusses alternative careers for physicians who want to leave traditional medicine. Sometimes the suggestions are decidedly non-medical, such as getting one’s real estate license or flipping houses. They may also include non-clinical careers that still require physician expertise, such as pharma, life sciences, or medical device manufacturers. Sometimes they even include staying in your specialty, but moving from a traditional practice to a locum tenens format to have more flexibility and variety.

This week, the discussion veered off into the realm of clinical informatics. I almost spit cocoa on my keyboard when one author said they were interested in clinical informatics because they wanted to get away from working with people.

I was happy to see several clinical informaticists chime in on how we work with people all the time. One noted that not only do we work with people, but often they are often tired and overworked clinicians just like the original poster. Another described the not-so-fun state of being caught between administrators who want to bloat the EHR’s configuration for business reasons and end users who want a streamlined experience that makes it easier for them to care for patients. It was clear that many of the people asking about it don’t understand the requirements needed to work at the top level in our field, such as fellowship training, board certification, or considerable experience.

I was proud of how the clinical informaticists represented our specialty – recommending an online typing tutor for the one-finger typist, AMIA 10×10 courses for the budding informaticists, and more. They encouraged the physicians interested in learning more to volunteer for technology committees at their organizations, take additional training for EHR workflows, or even pursue becoming a super-user if they are really interested in crossing to our side of the clinical trenches. We get to do and see a lot of cool things and it’s a different way of using our clinical skills to help large numbers of patients rather than just influencing those we could see in our own practices.

I was less proud of the non-informatics physicians on another thread that piled on for some complaints about EHR vendors. One chap talked all about his experiences with a particular system and how terrible it was and listed specific defects that made it unusable in his opinion. As someone who has used that system extensively, I became suspicious. Only by reading well below the scroll did you get to the part where he says that he hasn’t used the system in more than a decade. I’ve seen a lot of good EHRs and some bad ones too, but the biggest struggles I’ve seen are with decent EHRs that were ineffectively configured and implemented. I’m working with a vendor now that has extensive training resources and I wonder how many users know what’s available at their fingertips.

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I wasn’t surprised that the COVIDtests.gov website had a soft go-live on Tuesday ahead of its scheduled debut. It seems to be working relatively well except for some issues processing requests from multi-family buildings. The tests are limited to four per household and won’t ship for a while, which limits their utility during the current omicron surge. Testing capacity has somewhat improved in our community, but at-home test kits are still hard to find, leading to challenges for those hoping for a quick turnaround. A good friend knew I had a stash of kits and asked to use one, which was a fair trade given his history as a maker of excellent gin and tonics. After 15 minutes in my outdoor driveway COVID clinic, he headed home with at least a small measure of reassurance.

I didn’t think much about it because I was just glad to help a friend out, until he sent me a thought-provoking text: “You know what just struck me about last night? In the richest country in the world, I, a fully insured patient, had to turn to what amounts to a black market supplier for a medical test.” Funny but not funny, and painfully true. Maybe next time I have to offer some driveway swabbing, I’ll pair my gloves with a trench coat and some kicky boots.

What’s your most challenging experience trying to obtain a COVID test? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 1/17/22

January 17, 2022 Dr. Jayne 1 Comment

I’ve done several projects in the last couple of years that involve health IT interoperability. Each has been challenging in its own way. There are varying state requirements for data exchange and those have been a factor in some of the projects, with lots of extra time and effort spent trying to obtain patient consent when an opt-in strategy is in play. There are also plenty of requirements about protecting information that has been identified as sensitive, including that related to mental health, reproductive health, and the care of minors. Given all those considerations, for most of the projects my consulting efforts have probably been 80% focused on the operational and governance aspects as opposed to the technical ones.

Not that I’m a stranger to the tech piece. I started working with my first health information exchange in the early 2000s and those days certainly were an adventure. We were using it to share records within our own organization due lack of institutional support for an enterprise EHR. Since a given patient might have three or four charts on the system depending on where they sought care, we were using the HIE to try to create some semblance of a comprehensive patient record. It wasn’t elegant, but it got the job done, and we managed to reduce some duplications and identify some controlled substance reconciliation issues along the way.

Fast forward. Although the information superhighway may have been smoothed with the technology equivalent of a new coat of asphalt, there are still some steep grades and dangerous curves. There is a tremendous amount of trust that when vendors say their solutions are interoperable that they truly are. However, as with nearly everything in the healthcare information technology world, the devil is in the details. A lot of organizations have consolidated their enterprise purchases around a handful of vendors under the assumption that such decisions would bring greater interoperability and easier data sharing. There is quite a bit of variation though as organizations might not be on the same versions of a given platform.

There is also a lack of attention to the operational differences between organizations that might choose not to share certain types of data for a variety of reasons. Business goals are high on this list – reducing patient leakage, trying to consolidate all of a patient’s care at a single health system, preserving high-margin service lines, and more. Often these issues don’t become hot topics until interoperability projects are well underway and they can essentially derail even the most well-planned technical project.

A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association looked at the interoperability limitations that are found even when organizations have the same EHR vendor. Although overall data exchange is somewhat easier, there are still struggles with data normalization and reconciliation. The authors looked at nearly 70 oncology sites that were using one of five EHRs and calculated interoperability scores for sharing with the same EHR as well as scores for sharing with a different EHR. They included 12 specific data elements, equally split between medications and laboratory tests, which are standardized within oncology practice.

Not surprisingly, same vendor sharing had stronger interoperability scores than sharing between different vendors. However, the results should be enlightening for anyone who hopes to do these types of projects. The authors noted that, “Reliable interoperability requires institutions to map their data to the same standards and ensure that mapping practices are consistent across institutions.” They also noted the importance of looking at potential interoperability of specific data elements. For example, there may be different levels of interoperability when looking at medications as compared to lab results or imaging studies. Even within those categories, organizations need to look at how interoperability looks for common medications and laboratories versus less common or rare examples.

Although some might think that greater standards for interoperability measures might be the answer, the researchers are concerned that this might lead to vendors and their clients focusing their attention on those elements that are being monitored rather than the overall picture. They noted, “it will be important to ensure that certification does not replace poor interoperability with poor interoperability except for a few chosen data elements.” We certainly saw this type of behavior in the Meaningful Use era when there was a tremendous degree of focus on checking the boxes even if it was at the expense of quality patient care and user satisfaction.

I’d like to see a similar study performed looking at primary care interoperability as opposed to a subspecialty such as oncology. Primary care is the core of healthcare and where the greatest exists for interoperability so that we can use existing data, avoid duplicate and wasteful studies, manage overlapping medications, and provide a comprehensive plan of care for individual patients. I’d like to see how easy it really is for my Epic-using internal medicine physician to get information from the radiologist across town who is on a different instance of Epic, as well as from the surgeon who is using Cerner in the hospital and NextGen in their office, and the telehealth vendor I used when I was out of state and the county health clinic where I might have had a COVID test. Despite what integrated delivery networks are hoping for, many of us choose the best physician for our situation regardless of whose logo is on the door.

I’d also like to see how it plays out for emergency department encounters since patients don’t always get to choose which facility they’re taken to in an acute situation. In fact, COVID is running so rampant in my city right now that one municipal ambulance district is refusing to take patients anywhere but the two closest hospitals unless the patient requires specialized pediatric care. Given the time it takes to clean the vehicles after transporting COVID-positive patients and get them back into service, they’re trying to avoid long runs and decrease their turnaround time. There’s a tremendous number of patients that seek care at our city’s other major health system, which makes the need for solid interoperability even more important.

What has your experience been with interoperability, either with the same vendor or different ones? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 1/13/22

January 13, 2022 Dr. Jayne 3 Comments

Mr. H recently threw out a challenge: “Discuss: a physical line of people waiting for something indicates a failure of technology to meet a need.” I’ll certainly take the bait on this one.

I recently needed to do three transactions at my state’s motor vehicle agency. The first involved renewing my car’s annual registration, and it was very straightforward online. Typically when you do this in person, you have to show at least four paper documents. For online renewals, though, the system is hooked up with the motor vehicle inspection sites as well as the taxation agency, to make sure everything is current. For the mere price of a $3 convenience fee, I had it completed in less than five minutes. The sticker that I needed to apply to my plates arrived in the mail less than a week later, and the emotional labor to complete the entire process was zero.

Contrast that with the other two transactions, which had to be done in person. Due to the explosion of COVID in my state, the office only allows a handful of people in the building at the time. The last time I had to go there in person was in August, and at that time I waited nearly 45 minutes outside before being able to enter the building and wait in line some more. Although they had appointments during the height of the first COVID peak, they no longer offer it, despite our current peak being significantly higher than the original.

Enter the emotional labor component of the exercise. I had to look at my work schedule, figure out when I could take off during normal business hours, and marry that up with the weather forecast to try to avoid being outside in sub-zero temperatures or freezing rain. I also had to move a couple of meetings and checked three different websites to make sure I had the correct paperwork for both transactions, because having to come back would be exasperating. On the appointed day, I dug out my heavy boots and heavy coat and decided to give it a go.

Usually there are two lines, one for vehicle-related transactions and one for driver licenses and ID cards. Likely due to the online vehicle process, there was no line for those transactions. Once I made it into the building, I found the vehicle side of the office, where three agents sat waiting. Everyone who walked in was handled in real time. When the vehicle agents had nothing to do, they would start a “pre-check” process for the people waiting in the driver license line, making sure they had all their paperwork in order to try to keep the process from bogging down. Several people were turned away from the line, which was for a while the only thing that made it appear to move. The office has two workstations that can take pictures, but one was unstaffed.

Once you got to the licensing workstation, you had to present the little paper slip that you received from the pre-check station, and the worker would key in the particulars and collect payment. Then you had to do a vision test followed by multiple computer screens that you had to validate and sign before the photo was taken. Finally, the worker printed a temporary license, punched a “void” marker on your old license, and you were done. The worker then sanitized the station and called the next person over. There were multiple delays for things like people removing coats, fluffing hair, reapplying lipstick that was smeared by masks, etc. In the time that a single patron was taken care of, the pre-check worker had reviewed at least the documents of at least four people.

I got to go through the whole scenario twice since I had two different renewals and there was no sharing of data from one transaction to another. I had to write two paper checks to pay for them. (This is sounding a lot more like healthcare, isn’t it?) In one photo, I look great, and in the other, I look like I’m on a wanted poster, so it didn’t work out too well for me (although if the process was more streamlined, I might have looked like a suspect on both).

I’m a serious process improvement nerd, so I’ll offer a couple of potential solutions. These processes have the same challenges that we have in the healthcare space, including patient / client registration, managing wait times, identify verification, demographic verification, payment collections and processing, photo acquisition, history gathering, and more. What if there were people who had dedicated their careers to improving processes like these? It’s a good thing I’ve worked with a couple of people like that. When you start thinking about solutions to these problems, they’re not always novel. Some are low tech and others are high tech, but to eliminate all the defects in the process, you could use a combination of solutions.

Let’s take a shot at it, shall we? Assuming a low staffing situation, if workers were cross-trained, they could have used the second camera workstation. Since agents on the other side had capacity, if they were able to run the slow process, it could have doubled throughput. Or, they could have used the available agents to add some additional flair to the pre-check process, asking people to remove their coats, organize their belongings, pre-write their payment checks, etc. so they would be ready for the next step in the process. If they really wanted to get fancy, they could have had the trained person run both camera stations (they were literally next to each other) and used the excess staff to assist by sanitizing the stations in between rather than it becoming a bottleneck. That person could also have voided the licenses and handed out receipts after they printed. I feel like just telling people what to expect and encouraging them to get their ducks in a row before they approached the station would have helped a lot.

On the technology side, they could dust off their appointment system since it worked during the early stages of the pandemic. Second, they could have a simple texting system that would allow people to check in and wait in their cars until they received a message that they were third in line or something like that, and to come in. If they wanted to get fancy, the state could develop an online portal where registrants could pre-submit their paperwork and have it approved remotely, verify all the information they would normally verify on the screens, and receive a confirmation ticket that they could bring to the office, eliminating the majority of the process for a subset of customers willing to start the process online (except for the vision test and photo, that is). Or, they could have a separate photo kiosk where customers could do their own photo, or have it taken by a less-trained person, so that it was already in the system and the staffer would just have to marry it up with the appropriate demographics.

Alas, though, my state is one of the last in the union to adopt such cutting-edge technologies as Real ID, immunization registries, and prescription drug monitoring programs, so I have little hope. I’m definitely keeping my eye out for consulting postings on the state procurement agency website. I might be able to monetize what feels pretty obvious.

What are your thoughts on other processes where lines of people are a failure of technology to meet a need? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 1/10/22

January 10, 2022 Dr. Jayne 2 Comments

I started my HIMSS22 preparations in earnest today with the booking of my flights. I had looked at them a few weeks ago and then was sidetracked by a multitude of things, and based on the dramatic jump in price, I am glad I went back and got them today. I’ll be coming from an airport that isn’t a major hub, so there are some limitations, but I was surprised to see them jump over $300 in two weeks. Capitalism is alive and well, and who doesn’t love warm weather in March? As usual, I’m flying my favorite no-change-fee airline, so if HIMSS throws us a curve ball, I’ll be covered.

Mr. H pondered this weekend whether hospitals will allow their employees to attend. I would say that’s up in the air and all depends on what happens with new coronavirus variants. My local institution banned international travel at the end of December, but said people could travel domestically if they could be back at work within 24 hours. I questioned whether that was realistic based on the number of cancellations in the airline industry. Now they’ve ratcheted it up to the “don’t plan to go anywhere in the next two weeks” level. Many of my super-subspecialty friends are pretty much isolating except for going to work because there are limited numbers of them at each hospital and they can’t afford to both be sick at the same time. Hospitals are still restricting N95s, which I think is not only ridiculous, but counterproductive.

Our area hospitals are doing daily press conferences where they try to keep people calm and confident, but those on the inside wish they would do a little more to paint a picture of what’s really going on. At one hospital where a friend is an emergency department director, they’ve run out of portable oxygen tanks twice this weekend. When that happens, it’s a mad scramble to rearrange patients and get them connected to a wall unit. It also increases the time that patients have to be boarded in the emergency department because they can’t be transported to the inpatient floors if they’re on oxygen and there are no tanks.

One of them finally came out over the weekend and said they had halted all COVID testing for individuals without symptoms. That means no back-to-school or back-to-work testing and no tests prior to travel. I get it – they have to reserve the tests for patients where the result is going to make a difference in how they are managed – but it has pushed testing to the other facilities in town, which were already drowning. Most of the commercial testing vendors now have a three-day wait for testing, and turnaround times can be three or four days on top of that, which makes things challenging.

The same system had announced that it is freezing non-critical surgical procedures. The other players in town are functionally doing the same thing, but are soft-pedaling it to the public by saying that they are managing patients “on a case-by-case basis.” Everyone is nearly out of monoclonal antibodies and no one can get their hands on the new pill-based therapies, but no one is saying that publicly.

The state has dipped below 15% available intensive care beds, yet a number of people aren’t batting an eye. They’re going about their lives like they did pre-COVID, and any talk of flattening the curve to protect healthcare workers and preserve hospital capacity is met with scorn. I ran across someone today who insisted that there’s not a shortage of nurses due to sickness or being out to care for sick family or children whose schools have closed. They said it is because “all those nurses quit rather than taking that poisonous jab.” As someone who has seen the real stats (1.25% attrition rate for failure to vaccinate), I didn’t even engage in the conversation. It’s not worth it and there will be no changing of hearts or minds with that one.

Two more physician friends resigned this week, although they still have to remain in their respective hellscapes for another 90 days for contractual reasons. Hopefully, we’ll hit the peak soon and then come down the back side of it quickly so they can get some relief. Projections are that numbers will continue to be record-breaking for the next two weeks.

Both of them reached out to me for information about telehealth practice and other ways to use their degrees without caring for patients in person. They’re both great docs and I wish I could leverage their expertise on some of my teams, but unfortunately, they don’t have much non-patient-facing experience. I have plenty of other friends who want to leave their jobs but haven’t yet due to a sense of loyalty or altruism. Some have developed healthy coping strategies, but others not so much, so I’m keeping an eye on those that are in the latter cohort.

If you’ve got friends in the clinical trenches, please be aware that generally they are not OK. Although they may seem to be coping on the surface, I don’t know of anyone who isn’t struggling to some degree. Help how you can, whether it’s having a meal delivered or just leaving a bottle of wine on the porch. Physicians are finding creative ways to pitch in. A group of local subspecialists has been reaching out on physician social media groups offering to care for patients who might normally have been seen in primary care for dermatology, ear / nose / throat, and digestive issues. They’ve also offered parking lot space for drive-through testing, which would be great if people could get supplies. Some of our local primary care practices are running seven days a week due to demand, but others have had to close entirely due to lack of staff. Things are truly all over the place.

We’re only 10 days into the new year and I don’t think it’s going as anyone hoped. Regardless of where you work in the healthcare universe, keep an eye out for those who are struggling and offer a kind word or a sympathetic ear where you can. We’re all in this together and it’s going to continue to be bad for the next several weeks.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 1/6/22

January 6, 2022 Dr. Jayne 2 Comments

I spent a couple of hours tonight on the phone with a colleague who is burned out and thinking about leaving medicine. She was asking my advice, not only as someone who has worked in a variety of different care-delivery paradigms, but also as someone who might be able to help mitigate some of the hassles she’s currently encountering.

She’s part of a large Direct Primary Care practice, which manages patients more like customers as opposed to patients. Unfortunately for the physician, that comes with the expectation of 24×7 access. Apparently the organization is using something from Salesforce as a substitute for a patient portal, and when messages come in, they are in a silo, requiring the physician to also log into the EHR, load the patient, then double-document in both places. Adding to her frustration is a recent change to the Salesforce side where she can only manage messages from a laptop, which makes it hard to be 24×7 accessible if you ever want to step away from your desk or have a life.

We had a good chat about alternatives to in-person care including telehealth, which I think she’s considering. We discussed some of the pitfalls of the different telehealth companies and the challenges of being an independent contractor versus being employed, as well as the dramatically different processes that the national telehealth providers use to onboard new physicians. As someone who has historically been efficient with the EHR, I think she’ll struggle with their homegrown EHR-lite solutions, but she needs a change if she’s going to maintain her humanity.

We talked a lot about the concept of moral injury and how hard it is to deliver good care when you’re constantly operating under crisis standards of care, you don’t have adequate staff, and you’re being pushed to see more patients per hour than your comfort level allows. I’m glad she reached out and is contemplating a change. Too often, physicians wait until they’re past the point of no return or until a significant negative event forces their hands. Hopefully, telehealth will give her some breathing room while she steps away from in-person care and allows herself to recharge.

Despite my disappointment at being denied a media credential for the Consumer Electronics Show, different examples of cool technology are falling into my lap through other outlets. The first thing I ran across today was the clear-sided toaster, which not only allows you to monitor the progress of your toast, but has one-touch defrost, reheat, and bagel functions as well as seven browning levels. I haven’t shopped for any kitchen electronics in forever, but if my $9 college toaster ever gives up the ghost, one with clear sides might just be on the short list.

Withings reached out regarding its new BodyScan device, which is undergoing clinical and regulatory validation. Described as “the first at-home connected health station,” it promises to deliver weight, segmental body composition, and six-lead electrocardiogram data as well as a calculation of vascular age and an assessment of nerve activity. I’ve been happy with my Withings blood pressure cuff and have a couple of friends with Withings scales. The BodyScan certainly looks interesting, and at a $300 price point, will be attractive to people who have become accustomed to spending $800-$1600 on a smartphone.

I also ran across this smart watch sensor that helps with opioid relapse. The team at University of Massachusetts Amherst, along with colleagues at Syracuse University and SUNY Upstate Medical University, received a $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Smart and Connected Health program to continue work on the project. The sensor feeds data to a machine learning platform to help identify if physical signs such as respiratory rate, electrocardiogram findings, etc. are at levels that indicate opioid cravings. Once a craving is identified, the device alerts the wearer to consider mindfulness techniques to try to address the situation. Ultimately, they hope to customize those interventions based on individual patient characteristics. Researchers believe they can identify with 80% accuracy when a user has taken an opioid. They hope it may evolve to help ensure proper use of prescribed opioids to prevent opioid use disorder. This is an area where we need as much assistance from technology as we can get, so I’m excited to see how it progresses.

Kohler knows I’m a sucker for the dream of a high-tech, aromatherapy-rich bath, and sent me information about its new PerfectFill technology that uses voice commands to control the temperature, filling, and draining of a bath. No more sticking your finger under the faucet while you fiddle with the knobs or worrying about scalding a little one. A former urgent care colleague who left the urgent care trenches to go to school to become a plumber let me know that the bath I swooned over last year requires special installation considerations and that he used it as an example for a class project. I know who I’m calling when I win the lottery.

I also did a bit of technology mourning this week, as I learned that all former BlackBerry phone services stopped working this week due to lack of support. BlackBerry was a tech darling in the days prior to the iPhone and at one point seemed like the number one business accessory. The last BlackBerry OS was released in 2013, but people have been limping the devices along as phones or messaging devices. I have to admit I still have a BlackBerry Torch, with its keyboard hidden beneath a sliding touch screen. It’s possibly one of my favorite phones, and fun to show off when I participate in STEM-based education programs where we talk about the history of personal electronics and communication. Most of the youth I work with can’t imagine life without a smartphone, let alone life without the internet, so it’s fun to talk with them about the pre-internet days when we used dial-up connections to bounce messages around the country.

What’s your favorite piece of extinct technology, be it healthcare or something else? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 1/3/22

January 3, 2022 Dr. Jayne 1 Comment

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Most of my regular readers know I’m a fan of pastry therapy, but I decided to start the year out with something a little different. My food-related knot-tying skills are apparently far less developed than those used for everyday applications (or even wilderness survival), but the taste made up for the lack of aesthetics. The warm oven made the kitchen a little more habitable with the cold snap we’re experiencing, and what better way to reflect on a new year than sitting around watching dough rise?

The last two years have made most of my friends and colleagues reflective, and I’m no different. After slogging through the worst year and a half of clinical practice I’ve ever had, I decided to hang up my stethoscope for a while. Although I’m still practicing telehealth, it’s been a transition, and I’ve spent a lot of time explaining to friends and relatives what exactly it is that I do. Unless they’ve had a telehealth visit themselves, they usually don’t quite understand how we can provide care without the ritual laying on of hands that occurs in the doctor’s office.

I’ve done some medical volunteering to keep my skills sharp, as well as some in-town locum tenens work. I’ve learned more about epidemiology and infectious diseases than I ever thought I would know, as I work to advise local schools and youth-serving organizations on how to navigate the ever-changing new normal. I’ve piloted new paradigms in specialty board certification for two different disciplines; experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly of remote continuing education; and have finally transitioned to reading all but one medical journal electronically.

I watched my consulting business ride the rollercoaster of the pandemic, alternating between not having enough work and being crushed by requests my team can’t fulfill. I picked up three clients, watched one get acquired, saw one flounder, and supported a couple more as they continue to onboard new clients and expand their offerings. I’ve become adept at canceling travel more than I book and finally let my Alaska Airlines credits that I couldn’t use in April 2020 lapse into oblivion. Victoria BC, I would have loved to have seen you, and to have embraced the floatplane adventure we had planned, but it just wasn’t meant to be.

After some medical misadventures, I started to embrace the idea of a bucket list – doing things while I’m young and healthy rather than waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve also vowed to take advantage of unique opportunities when they present themselves instead of overthinking them.

I spent a week in the Florida Keys, snorkeled through jellyfish, went nearly 60 miles per hour on a zip line, and did things in a climbing harness that I didn’t think I’d ever do. I’ve now officially soaked in a chandelier-lit hot tub in the French Quarter after a long day of work and shoe shopping, and am glad to have found some new travel companions for when things are a little closer to the “normal” we all remember. I had a multi-week adventure following an 80-year-old steam engine and enabled some quality teenaged school-skipping along the way. My only open bucket list item is exchanging my motorcycle permit for an actual license so I can do a road trip with my dad, but we’ll have to wait for the wind chill to disappear before I work on that one.

I’m looking forward to 2022, because frankly it can’t get any worse than what some of us have been through the last two years. Lives interrupted, loved ones lost, fires, floods, tornadoes, dreams denied, and life generally feeling upside-down are things we’ve all had to deal with as we figure out how to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I’ve met some amazing new colleagues who I’ll continue working with in the new year, and hopefully we’ll be able to deliver some cool new things that will help patients and providers alike. I’m excited to be entering my twelfth year writing for HIStalk and can’t wait to get back to the exhibit hall madness that is HIMSS and catch up in person with my healthcare IT besties.

What are you looking forward to in 2022? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 12/30/21

December 30, 2021 Dr. Jayne No Comments

Monday’s clinical adventures were full of patients who had been exposed to COVID-19 over the Christmas holiday. A good number of them tested positive on home tests and wanted to speak to a physician to request a laboratory order for a PCR test, because they didn’t believe the home test was accurate.

There’s a bunch of epidemiology calculations that can be done to explain this using pre-test probability, sensitivity, specificity, etc. but they all roll up to this. If you have symptoms and any test is positive, whether it’s a home test or not, you need to take it as fact and isolate yourself. The healthcare system is being crushed in my state and there aren’t enough tests for people to double test.

A couple of local physician offices turned off the phones Monday because so many staff members were out that they simply could not handle the volume and opted to triage everyone to their patient portal. I’m having some guilt about not seeing patients in person while my colleagues are being pummeled, but will do what I can to help from a telehealth standpoint.

Also on the telehealth front, both Ohio and New Jersey have new telehealth bills that were recently signed into law. Common themes include expanded access, preventing insurers from denying coverage, and granting payment parity between in-person and virtual care. The Ohio bill’s expansion provisions include allowing additional provider types to deliver virtual services including optometrists, pharmacists, physician assistants, and school psychologists. It also broadens the list of entities that can bill Medicaid for telehealth services.

Proponents don’t believe that the expansion and payment provisions will raise healthcare costs, as was argued in other states such as New Jersey earlier in the year. An initial telehealth bill was rejected there due to concerns about increased costs to taxpayers, but now the bill has been signed with the condition that the state department of health will study telehealth use and patient outcomes.

Telehealth advocacy group as well as patient advocacy groups are calling for reinstitution of so-called COVID-waivers for telehealth services, which were a key part of the initial pandemic response. On an individual basis, many states allowed any licensed provider to see patients regardless of whether they had a license in those specific states.

Even health systems that normally provide telehealth urgent care services are struggling, partly due to patients who have traveled for the holidays and now can’t get remote care from their “home” health system because they’re outside their normal state of residence. This is a great example of why the telehealth laws need to evolve. I’m confident that my personal physician can care for me virtually whether my body is in my house or sitting on the beach hundreds of miles away, even if my state doesn’t think so.

Also in telehealth news, the Department of Health and Human Services announced $35 million in American Rescue Plan funding to expand telehealth infrastructure and capacity for Title X family planning providers. Many of the Title X providers are part of the so-called health care safety net that provides care for low-income populations and other groups who might not otherwise receive care. The funds will be distributed as 60 one-time grants that will be given to active Title X program participants. Applications are open on Grants.gov through February 3.

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I enjoyed a recent article on terms that make hospital executives cringe. I’d like to add my personal list of language elements I wish would go away: frictionless, the use of “solution” as a verb, ecosystem, the cloud, enablement, holistic, the Internet of Things, and anything prefixed with “smart.” They’re old and tired (and in the case of “working to solution something” just plain weird) and if we have all these brilliant minds in tech, certainly we can come up with something better.

I missed this story when Jenn sent it my way earlier in the month, but was happy to see it. It details the work of the Refugee Artisan Initiative, where newcomers to the US can receive skill training and experience with micro-businesses. The organization received a community investment grant from Swedish to cover creation of medical scrubs for its staff. The Initiative is making 500 sets of scrubs which will be custom sized for employees. My new clinical gig won’t allow me to wear scrubs, so after nearly two years of wearing them exclusively, I’m having to figure out what looks good under a white coat but won’t be bulky or aggravating.

Speaking of aggravating in the context of health tech, the team at the Consumer Electronics Show has spoken and has declined to approve my request for media credentials. The email simply said that my submitted credentials were inadequate and didn’t specify which of the two were problematic. I’m baffled because I submitted items that complied with their requirements and were of the same substance as last year (just more current, in keeping with their requirements). Lots of tech companies are backing out of the in-person show and switching to the digital edition, so we’ll have to see what the engagement level is for those who still plan to attend.

I’m still on the hunt for interesting health tech that can help engage patients and enjoyed reading about the Prevention circul+ Wellness Ring. The name is quite a mouthful and is partly due to the manufacturer’s co-branding with Prevention Magazine. The ring is bulkier than I’d like, but includes technology to measure blood oxygen levels, which is intriguing to any of us who are trying to manage COVID-positive patients in their homes. The team worked with clinicians at the VA and Kaiser to trial the technology and refine the design. It can now also record blood pressure and a single-lead electrocardiogram, with data captured in its associated app. FDA approval as a diagnostic medical device is still pending, but it’s something I’ll keep my eye on.

What kind of new devices would get your attention or hold your interest? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

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