Welcome to EMR and HIPAA

I was cleaning out my email and came across the following email:

I am enjoying your website!

Keep up the good work. We all need to keep the vision alive.

What a great email. Sometimes you wonder how many people are really finding what you write useful. I’ve created a decent body of work on this website. There’s certainly much more that I could do if I just committed a little more time.

In honor of this email I’m planning on “keeping the vision alive” and committing a little more time to enhancing EMR and most importantly EMR implementations.

I’m completely blown away by how well this EMR and HIPAA blog has done. As Christmas approaches I started thinking about last Christmas when I first decided that I would start a blog and write a few of my thoughts about EMR and HIPAA. Little did I know that blogging in general would become such a passion for me. I know I’ve been a little bit of a slacker lately on posting to this blog. I guess I’ve lost a little steam for EMR. I do it all day at work and so I think I find it fun to post about other things on my other blogs. Plus, I’ve been working on a few pet projects like Spoil My Spouse and Robin Hood Fund. They are both fun projects for me. I guess that’s the challenge of being a technology person is that I can see how it applies to almost every aspect of life and so I like to work on a variety of projects.

Well, life has been good to me on this EMR and HIPAA blog. In the past year I’ve had over 130,000 Visits to my blog. The number of Google searches that are sent to this blog each day absolutely astounds me. It’s fantastic that my little self can have make an impact on people’s lives around the world. I just hope that it’s a good impact.

This makes my 150th post. Sadly there have only been 160 comments on those posts. I would love to have more interaction and response from people, but I understand what it’s like to read something and not post. Although, I’ve mostly overcome that habit myself. I almost always have something to say. Ask my wife.

Over the next year, I look forward to a renewed commitment to making this blog that much better. I’m not sure I’ll ever reach the heights I was posting at previously, but I will do better. I will mention one possible chink in this new commitment. My wife is 9 months pregnant and due with our second child (a girl) on January 17th. That should be an exciting time. I can’t wait until my little princess arrives.

It’s really great to see more and more people blogging about healthcare. There is so much good information to read out there. Today I found a really well done blog for hospitals. It’s well written and has a nice design. I was a little disappointed with the navigation for their blog. It only shows one article at a time and it took me a minute to find out how to go to the other blog posts.

I think it’s a great idea for a hospital to blog. I think the best reason to blog is as a marketing and PR tool. A blog is a great way to interact with your customers. It gives you a perfect forum to discuss issues with your customers and get feedback. It’s also a great place to clear up any misconceptions about your hospital. I also love it as a place to announce changes and improvements that hospitals have made.

Disclaimer: I love and live blogs lately. Here’s just a few of my blogs:

Smuggle Me Blog
Something for Nothing
Fundraising Blog
BYU Sports Blog

The world is only beginning to see the far-reaching effects of Internet expansion in business and in every part of life, Kevin Rollins told the Center for eBusiness� advisory board.

BYU Center for eBusiness Newsletter

Kevin Rollins, CEO of Dell, talked to the BYU Center for eBusiness advisory board. I am a BYU fanatic. (If you don’t believe me then take a look at my BYU Sports Blog) The center for eBusiness is especially interesting to me. I think it’s a great idea for a University.

You can imagine my surprise when Kevin Rollins talked about the impact of EMR and RHIOs. Here’s an excerpt from the newsletter:

He also discussed some emerging Internet advances that are positively changing the medical field. Making health records available online will help medical professionals record treatments and assessments; it will allow doctors and facilities separated by thousands of miles to access patients� health records. Patients in turn will be able to compare and contrast hospitals and health care facilities across the nation to find the best fit for their needs. Currently, these advances are only being tested in highly populated cities. But expansion is both necessary and imminent.

�We just need more people experimenting and moving ahead on this so we have confidence that it will work,� he said.

I’m glad that someone understands the importance of EMR and RHIOs. One problem I see is that everyone is interested in the idea of EMR and exchanging patient records. However, not nearly enough doctors are implementing them. In an economic system, there has to be motivation for doctors to implement an EMR. Right now I don’t think those motivations are persuasive enough for doctors to implement an EMR. I hope this can change over time.

Over at my other EMR home, EMRUpdate, I started a thread asking people about what technology they are using for their clinical website.

I am seriously looking for a way to create a website that can be easily updated using web based forms. I think I know what I basically want to do. It’s just knowing the best way to do it. Here are some of my goals:

-Templating (theme) Features - I should be able to change the entire website design in a click of a button
-Admin Pages - The doctor must be able to update and change all the content on the site
-General - It must be general enough that once created I could easily roll it out for a new doctor where they can just update with their content
-PHP and MySQL - These are my own personal preferences for coding
-Statistics - It must have a statistics package that can be built into the software
-Expandable - I should be able to upgrade and expand it quickly and easily (but the doctor doesn’t have to know how quickly and easily)

I honestly think what I’m talking about is more than possible using Wordpress as a back end engine. However, DrM’s suggestion of using Joomla as the backend engine is quite intriguing. I already have one doctor’s office in mind for the website. Unfortunately, he’s not very good about deciding what content he would like on his website.

So, if there are any doctors reading this that are interested in working with me to create a website for them let me know. I’d have to charge something, but it would be more than reasonable.

No I’m not planning on making an EHR or patient portal. You might be able to integrate one of those into the website, but I’m talking about a website with information on your practice and possibly links to educational material.

The Healthcare Blogosphere has really been moving a lot since I’ve been distracted with a few other projects. I also attribute my lack of posts to it being summer. Summer for me includes long vacations and more importantly, no school. Since I don’t have classes with internet I haven’t had as much time to post on the blog. My apologies because there have been a lot of important things going on. Hopefully I can catch up on a few of the things that I’ve missed during this time.

First, is that The Medical Blog Network is hosting the First-Ever Conference on Healthcare Blogging called Healthcare Blogging Summit 2006 in Washington, DC. I would certainly love to attend, but unfortunately, I’m afraid that DC is out of my budget at this time. I hope they do some online streaming of the program. At least a podcast or something. What about posting a video of the event on YouTube or Google Video? We’ll see what they’re able to come up with. If only I had the time and resources to attend. That would be a lot of fun. They seem to have a good list of people that are going to be there.

More posts to come soon!

As you may have noticed, my blog hasn’t been nearly as active over the past 2 weeks. You can blame it all on my wife since I spend almost all of my vacation days from work over the past 2 weeks. That’s not completely true since the state actually gives a fair number of vacation days. However, it is true that I was on vacation and therefore this blog got transgressed.

Don’t worry, I haven’t fallen off the planet and I have a number of good posts waiting in the wings. I think it is good for me to have some breaks sometimes. Maybe I need to find someone else to contribute to my blog too. That way my absence won’t be so noticeable. Any takers?

I also have been dreaming lately about presenting at some conference somewhere. I think I have some decent content and could do a pretty good job. I’m just not sure how to really get started. Not to mention figuring out the funding mechanism for getting to those conferences. I’m seriously considering going to HIMSS, but I’m not sure that’s the right play for me. I think I would get an interesting taste of what hospitals are doing and probably be pretty disappointed with what I could take away. I’m not sure what other conferences there are around, but if anyone has any connections and wants to hook me up then please let me know.

An EMR and HIPAA blog reader recently contacted me about a health search engine that he is creating called Healia.com. Being the nice guy that I am I decided to go and check out the search and see what kind of results it would give. Of course since I have an EMR website I of course focused on searches for EMR first and then I moved into my own personal health searches. Here’s the comments I sent to Healia:

I did a number of searches on the site. The search definitely seems better than any other health search out there. Although, I think it will be interesting what Google Health is able to produce with their Google Health Co-op.

A few comments:
-How come emrandhipaa.com isn’t there? I tried a number of EMR searches and the information wasn’t that useful(besides the fact that my website wasn’t there). In fact, one of the searches looked like it would have some good informtion from HIMSS. I opened the link and unfortunately it was just a list of presentations that were being done on that subject. That was dissappointing.
-Many of the medical term searches I did pulled up information on the term I used, but was related to HIV patients. This happened multiple times. That is good information if I was HIV positive. However, to see it on multiple generic searches seems like the specific HIV pages were getting too much weight.
-A search for “swimmers ear” gave me as a consumer(not a doctor) some great information on what was happening. Excellent result
-A search for heart burn didn’t bring up good search results at all. None of it seemed relevant to me as a consumer

Well, overall I think they still have a little ways to go. In a response to my email he wanted to emphasize the need for people’s feedback on the site and it’s ability to produce good or bad results. He also pointed out that I don’t know how to type heart burn and should have typed it heartburn and I would have gotten better results. I think that his search should have told me I didn’t know how to spell and offered me the correct spelling.

He also offered that emrandhipaa.com would be added to the search engines list of sites to crawl. I just searched EMR with no success. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and so I searched “EMR and HIPAA” and still didn’t see my site. If Google puts me number 1 for the search “EMR and HIPAA” I’m not sure why Healia won’t.

I also found another interesting result. There was a result of a PDF file and the subject name was something like “C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator…” That type of result should definitely be stripped out.

Either way, I was appreciative for the personal information I found on why I get blasted swimmer’s ear.

UPDATE: I got a message from Tom at Healia.com and he said that my site, along with many others, will be added to the next index when it rolls out in a couple weeks. I’ll be watching for that.

I’ve finally decided to move my EMR and HIPAA blog to its own server and leave behind my beloved http://crashutah.com/emr It has been more of a pain to move it than I thought. If I would have known how painful it would be to move I may have put it off indefinitely. I have a feeling that I’ll be having some problems for the next couple days as DNS updates and I notify HITSphere about the new feed address, etc, but I think I’ve been able to do this without anyone getting lost. The content should always be there. I am going to be losing a little statistical data, but that’s ok.

Everyone should change their bookmarks/favorites to the new and improved www.emrandhipaa.com It is nice to see the real domain name there. I can’t imagine people could really take me seriously with crashutah.com. Please let me know if you see something that doesn’t look quite right. Thanks.

I’m thrilled to say that we just passed 30,000 visitors to EMR and HIPAA. It really is something else to think that so many people have come to this site to find out about EMR and HIPAA. I’m really happy to see its success. In fact, I didn’t realize how well I was doing at attracting visitors until I looked at a great Healthcare IT blogger recently posted that since tracking his statistics since September 2004 he just hit 10,000 visitors. Pretty amazing that I just started blogging in December 2005.

It’s been a roller coaster getting it started. Now that I’m a little more established with some quality content in place I have been taking a step back to see where I want to take my EMR and HIPAA blog. I definitely want to work on some of my fixed pages:
EMR and EHR Vendors
EMR vs. Paper Charts
EMR Evaluating and Purchasing
EMR Features
EMR Implementation Ideas

I also want to work more on giving details to those interested on implementing an EMR. I want to start doing my initial vision of reviewing various EMR systems. I’ve already started some of the reviews, but I’ve been debating the best way to review an EMR system in an unbiased and professional manner. If you have any ideas please post a comment so I can have your feedback.

Mostly, thanks for helping me reach 30,000. It’s amazing to me that I have gone from 0 to 30,000 so fast. Espescially since this EMR blog was started as a Christmas whim. Who would have thought I’d love EMR so much?