Many doctors are now getting into movie production and making videos that are loaded onto YouTube.  These videos are effective in attracting new patients and educating your existing patients.  There are a few guidelines that you can use to create an effective script for each of your videos.  These scripts can be loaded onto your computer in a PowerPoint format and will serve as poor man’s teleprompter to assist in ...

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I am an EMR geek who isn’t so thrilled with the direction of EMR.  So what, I have been asked, would make EMR something that is really meaningful?  What would be the things that would truly help, and not just make more hoops for me to jump through?  A lot of this is not in the hands of ...

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My group purchased our electronic health records system (EHR) about 5 years ago.  We had 4 clinical practice locations (soon to be 5 1/2) with 1 administration office.  None of these sites are close to each other.  A major reason for purchasing an EHR was, and still is, to collect and analyze all data from our entire practice for the purpose of determining outcomes of our treatments. In other words, ...

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I read a few months ago that the number of available iPhone apps had exceeded a million, with new apps now appearing that are intended to help sort through the mountain of other apps. We have reached the age of meta-apps.  Parenthetically, I have always loved that “meta”concept. In college, when people asked why I majored in philosophy despite the fact that I was pre-med, I explained that my intention was to become ...

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Does your doctor use a computer in the exam room? Some people think that computers are a great way to keep track of patient information.   Others see some advantage, but problems in the implementation.  There are also a few Luddites who oppose this change simply on principle.   I’ve had good experiences, and bad experiences, and believe we have a long way to go before computers are as helpful as they could be. There ...

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This past July marked the 16th anniversary of the installation of our electronic medical record. Yup.  I am that weird. Over the first 10-14 years of my run as doctor uber-nerd, I believed that widespread adoption of EHR would be one of main things to drive efficiency in health care.  I told anyone I could corner about our drive to improve the quality of our care, while keeping our cash-flow out of ...

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A draft of standards for a health and medical app certification program was released recently by Happtique.  As a matter of disclosure I am proud to have been the Chair of the panel that drafted these standards.  The standards are in draft form and are open to public comment until August 17, 2012. While some might say that these standards add even more barriers to the commercial adoption of these technologies, there ...

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I love my new EMR, which I’ve been using for about 18 months now. I love having all my patients’ information at my fingertips in and out of the office. I don’t miss the piles of paper charts all over the place at all! In short, there’s really nothing about it I don’t like. My staff, on the other hand, hates it. Now that they’re not jumping up and down all the ...

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As a project manager working with hospitals on a daily basis, it can sometimes feel like I’m on an episode of "MythBusters." Consistently, I work with hospital executives, nurses, clinicians and IT staff that have been told “one-size-fits-all” when it comes to various technology implementations. And, in my experience, it typically doesn’t take long before the truth is exposed. For hospitals entertaining a technology implementation like medical device connectivity, there is ...

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The Jackson Coker Special Report on Apps, Doctors, and Digital Devices, originally published in October 2011, was featured in a recent online article with the headline “80% of Doctors Use Smartphones and Medical Apps in Everyday Medical Practice.” If one delves a bit more into the facts, the 80% quoted in the Jackson and Coker report is derived from yet another study by Aptilon reported in April, 2011 by mobihealthnews stating ...

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