I get a lot of business cards. Most of the time it is in the best interest of the person giving me the card to make it to my contacts. The problem I am the one that spends all of the time entering that information into Outlook, or my assistant. Either way it is not usually a good investment in time.

With Plaxo I put the burden of keying and maintaining that contact information of the person who gave me the card. I just enter their email address in the plaxo web site and they get an email with a link to a web page where they enter all their contact information. When that page is submitted it magically updates my contact list.

You should check out Plaxo (www.plaxo.com). It is free. It has resulted in a much better contact list and much less effort. It is also a great way to notify people when your contact information changes.

People seem to love using it. Interestingly, I accidentally sent out scores of invitation to people to update their contact information using Plaxo. Much to my surprise a surprisingly high number of those people decided to join Plaxo when they saw I was using it. The effect is still cascading as I see new people using it based on invitations from the people I invited.

I was amazed and frustrated by this. I spend a great deal of time trying to coax people into using new IT systems that will improve their life. Then I get this broad adoption of something that I sent out on accident. Go figure. Perhaps they saw that they would love Plaxo too.

I am not an expert in project planning, but at a minimum they should include:

• a list of tasks;
• details regarding what those tasks involved (not just one liners);
• a deliverable for each task;
• the accountable party;
• the dependencies between the tasks; and
• estimated durations of each task.

Some of the junk project plans that I see from vendors are very sad. I am not sure if they are poor planners or if they are just trying to keep things ambiguous to close their sale. I suspect it is both.

Notice: I mentioned that we are developing project plans before the sale. A detailed project plan and a detailed statement of work should be part of any significant IT contract. What I have traditionally seen take place for the first two months after a contract is signed would be better handled before the contract signing so both parties have a common understanding of the initiative.

Customer Service is much more complex in healthcare than in other industries because there are multiple customers that we serve. The primary customer are physicians that practice in our hospitals, payors that reimburse us for our services and that patients.

Often we speak of patients in non-customer service terms as well.

At Affinity we have coined a new term: Patomer. We use this when we are speaking of the patient in a customer service context. For example, we might say “allowing the patomer to pre-register online will eliminate wait times at the registration points.”

I wish I could take credit for this, but it was the brainchild of Paul Veregge, MD.

Can we all agree that HIPAA was a big ado over nothing and stop talking about it? I would be hard pressed to identify one thing that HIPAA has changed at my organization with regard to privacy and security. Sure, we had to some training, but we would normally do that. We produced a Notice of Privacy Practices, but does anyone read those? Are any of them written in a meaningful way?

While HIPAA has been well intended, it has had a negative impact. Where we used to talk about our concern for patient privacy and information security now we ask “are we HIPAA compliant?” I would argue that the later is a LOWER standard. We do much more to protect our patients’ privacy that HIPAA requires us. I think it is sad that we only focus on being compliant and not doing what is in the best interest of those we serve.

Let’s re-direct the conversation from “HIPAA” to privacy and security.

I received the following invitation from IBM to look at the new Thinkpads. The event is being held at the Miller brewery and includes a beer tasting. A skeptic (which I am) might think that IBM is resorting to getting its customers drunk in order to get them to buy their computers. But, I really think this has a lot more to do with Wisconsin culture than the IBM products…

Dear Mr.Weider, Per the phonemail I left you earlier today… I’m the IBM client rep that’s responsible for working with Affinity Health System. I’d like to invite you (attached .pdf file) to an IBM Think Smart Technology Briefing. We will be conducting an overview of our PC/ThinkPad product strategies in Milwaukee on Tues 4/26… these sessions are typically conducted by folks from our HQ/Executive Briefing Center– really top notch– and would be well worth your time. As you can see– session is being held at Miller Brewing– even having a brewery tour afterwards… bottomline– this would provide excellent introductory opportunity to the IBM/Lenovo business and product strategies… would your team be interested in attending?

Exchange Recovery is always a nightmare. Do yourself a favor and always tell your users you will be down all day. Anything more agressive will ultimately result in disappointment.

The problem with MS Access is that there is no application sharing built in…and it is expensive…and it needs to be loaded on every PC. Quickbase is a completely web-based service for building tables and relatively simple applications.

Intuit (yes, the Quicken people) has done a great job on the user interface. It is robust, yet easy to use. It is also very quick. I guess intuitive and quick is what you would expect from Intuit’s Quickbase.

Finally, I have a way to collaborate with others, via the web, on data sharing needs. We are now using Quickbase for issues lists, collaborative RFP development, and project tracking. Go check it out (www.quickbase.com).

For less than $10K per year you will have an enterprise-wide application development tool that will not require IS resources.

I have to get this off my chest…I have been looking at portfolio management software. The web is a great tool for finding out who is in this space and do a first pass qualification. The problem happens when one is really interested in pursuing something. Most of the web sites ask you to complete these idiotoc forms that apparently have been forwarded to nowhere. Here I am with money in hand and no one will return my inquiry. That drives me nuts.

I have just completed a PACS analysis and have to conclude that one cannot build a financial business case for PACS. I am finding that the cost of PACS maintenance alone offsets the film and productivity savings. In which case the millions of dollars in capital are all for naught. Sure there are “intangibles” such as improved turnaround time of radiology reports and the marketing value of the sporting the latest technology, but those are not worth the total investment in my mind.

So, how are these things getting bought? I believe They are added into new contruction projects where thay are a relatively minor cost and escape a thorough analysis. From there you are on the slippery slope where you need to continue to make investments to continue to do thing the “digital way.” These back door acquisitions also lead to poor acqusition processes that result in higher costs than and other disappointments.

Email me if you would like to see my PACS analysis.

I have been working a lot on Disaster Recovery lately. We had a disk failure that reminded us how important that is. Specifically, we need to improve how we recover everything that has happened since the last back-up tape.

For each system we are identifying the business processes that are supported by those systems, then looking at how we would recover the current day’s entries. Sometimes there is a paper audit trail. In many cases we are creating an electronic copy of the transactions in real-time and storing a couple of days off site. Many systems that use new database technology can use the transaction logs, but MEDITECH requires more work on our part. We are using print streams and interfaces to generate electronic copies of the transactions.

Email me if you want to see my DR plan.