I’m pretty sure that most of you didn’t notice that I was completely off the grid this last week. I was high up in the mountains at a high adventure scout camp enjoying the beauty of God’s creations while shooting guns, mountain biking, saling, hiking and many other amazing adventures. It’s actually a great thing for me to do it. It is great fun to work with fine young men and see them have these amazing experiences, but it’s also a great way for me to recharge. Hopefully you didn’t notice my absence since I scheduled the posts to appear as usual throughout the week.

This week I’m actually “on vacation” as well.  I’m in Rochester, NY where my wife is from. Although I’m never far from work. I’ll be spending some time posting as usual. Plus, I’m hoping to have lunch with a reader of this site while I’m here.  I’d love to meet other readers from Rochester if you’re free sometime too.

Not to mention, I met someone today that is a PA in DC and we talked for a little while about EMR. It’s always interesting to get new perspectives. Plus, I’m always amazed at how little these clinical people really know about the details of the stimulus. I guess that’s what happens when you eat, sleep, and drink it every day. This PA from DC also made me excited to go to DC sometime soon. So, if you know of a must attend healthcare IT conference happening in DC, let me know. I’ve never been and I now have a number of reasons to go out there. Plus, I’ve been itching to go to a conference. Of course, I’d love to meet any DC readers as well.

More tomorrow from the beautiful upstate NY. I’m not use to all this green.

My apologies for not having time to write a post today. It’s been a pretty crazy week with the Mobile Health Conference in Las Vegas and today I had a ton of things to get caught up on. Plus, tomorrow I’m doing a presentation at WordCamp Las Vegas which has kept me busy today. At the conference, I’ll be telling my story of how I went from being a “hobby blogger” to being a full time blogger and the lessons I learned along the way. Obviously, EMR and HIPAA & EMR and EHR play a large role in my successful switch.

WordCamp is a blogger conference for WordPress users, so I focus a fair amount on the various WordPress items I used along the way, but if you’re interested in my story there’s a live stream tomorrow at 10 AM PST. It will be the first time I’ve told my story in a venue like this, so it will be interesting to hear the attendees reaction. Hopefully they get some good takeaways.

We’ll be back this weekend with our regularly scheduled EMR programming. In fact, looks like I’m going to be hitting the airwaves on the physician focused XM radio station ReachMD soon. I believe I’m just going to do a few interviews for them. I mostly look at it as a good opportunity to have a cool experience. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll let you know more details and link the recordings once they go live.

I always think it’s fun to think back on the last 5 or so years doing this blog. When I first started there was a lot of excitement about HIT blogging. People were just kind of getting into it and there was a lot of interaction between bloggers. Then, it seemed like interest in the subject waned for a while. For example, one of my early “EMR blog sparring partners” was a blog called Calyx. From the looks of their archive, they lasted for just under a year of blogging and then just stopped. No note of why. Just no more posts. I actually thought maybe Calyx had gone out of business, but then I found their corporate website. I wonder how their Misys EMR stuff is going now.

I also use to enjoy some fun exchanges with the good people at TempDev. In fact, I still do on occasion, but you can see that they’ve gotten busy to blog. Or at least so it seems to me. Maybe I should find something to keep me more busy too. I guess for me blogging is part of my enjoyment. Why I enjoy writing about EMR is beyond me. I find it interesting and fun or I would have given up long ago. Like so many others that I could mention.

You can find a bunch of EMR and HIT related blogs listed on HITSphere. Sadly few of them are updated regularly. Not that I need any more content to read, but it’s fun to see what people find worth blogging about.

Of course, with the $18 billion of EMR stimulus money the whole EMR world has been reinvigorated and the biggest trend I’ve seen happening is the various EMR vendors joining the blogging world. I won’t try to list them all here, because there are far too many. Obviously, I’m a huge fan of blogging and the power of blogging. So, it’s nice to see EMR vendors join the discussion. Of course, that assumes that their blog is a discussion and not just a sales page and/or place for the press releases that no one wants to read.

Now, what does any of this have to do with you? Probably nothing really. Sometimes that’s the beauty of blogging. You’ll be surprised how many people will read you writing about nothing. As long as it doesn’t become a habit.

As I’ve been writing and reading about ARRA and the HITECH Act, I’ve had a few moments to consider the impact that things like the HIT Policy Committee will have on the future of EMR adoption in the US. Between that committee, ONCHIT and HHS the decisions they make will have far reaching impact on EHR adoption. I’ll leave the question of whether they’ll have a good or bad impact to another post.

Instead, I couldn’t help but wonder what impact bloggers and various EMR related websites and forums can have on EMR adoption. More specifically, I’ve been asking myself what kind of impact does this blog have on overall EMR adoption including both selection and implementation. Maybe I should be asking myself the question of how much impact could EMR bloggers have on influencing the HIT policy committee, ONCHIT and HHS, but I think that’s basically falling on deaf ears.

Instead, I think that bloggers like myself can have a real lasting impact on specific readers lives. Hopefully those who visit my blog get a better understanding of why they should implement an EMR. I hope they find some guidance on how to select an EMR and avoid various EMR sales miscommunication. At a minimum, I think the people who have bought the high volume scanners I suggested will be really glad they found this blog. I’m not sure why else people visit this blog.

Maybe this is all a little too personal, but I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on the impacts blogs and other EMR related resources have on EMR adoption. I’d like to think that blog like mine can have a good impact on the EMR world and aren’t just a nice place for those in the industry to sit around the virtual water cooler.

Either way, as I write future posts, I’ll be taking some of this into consideration. I think this will also give me a little bit of added motivation to complete a series of e-Books on EMR selection and EMR implementation. Hopefully those can provide some real targeted and valuable information to improve those two vital areas of EHR adoption.

I’m a huge fan of new media as you can probably imagine.  I do not only this blog, but also a number of other blogs as well.  I’m all over Twitter and I even recently started the EMR, EHR and HIPAA wiki.  Every day I’m amazed at how technology can enable people to connect in amazing ways.

That’s why I was really interested in an email I got recently about a Healthcare New Media Marketing Conference that’s happening in Phoenix.  Here’s a look at the topics they’ll be covering:

• Utilization of online media to reach patients, community groups and special interest groups
• Healthcare Blogging Pros and Cons
• Podcasting for Health Care Systems
• Creating Patient Communities with Social Networking Sites
• Metrics: Proving the value of New Media
• VideoCasting: How to Effectively Use Sites Like YouTube
• Best practices in utilizing Google for Health information
• Content Management Systems for Health Care Websites

Of course, my only question is why they didn’t ask me to speak at the conference.  I’ll forgive them this once.  I do wonder if they’ll be streaming this conference on Ustream or some other free video streaming service.

Check out the Press Release which contains full details on the event:

Healthcare New Media Marketing Conference Teaches Strategic use of Web 2.0 Applications

Connecting to Patients in Today’s Healthcare Environment 

(PHOENIX, March 4) Social Media has gone beyond the use within individuals’ personal lives, and now healthcare professionals are responsible for utilizing the various forms of web 2.0 applications to ensure consumers and patients are receiving accurate and positive portrayals of their organizations and services.  

One of the primary challenges faced by marketing executives that are enhancing their new media efforts is finding and justifying the costs associated with these new campaigns. Making time for these plans as well as quantifying the results are mounting obstacles for today’s health care marketing, communication, and public relations professionals. 

An exciting two-day conference will be held at The Wigwam Golf Resort & Spa in Phoenix, Arizona, on June 15-16 to highlight these issues and educate healthcare professionals with cutting-edge case studies, accurate methods for measuring results and a high-level of real-time information related to new media opportunities in healthcare systems.  

Attendees will walk away with the requisite know-how and tools to implement and to ultimately reach their target market in an accurate and appropriate manner.  

Topics discussed at the conference will include how to utilize online media to reach patients, community and special interest groups. Participants will receive accurate training on how to implement an effective marketing strategy utilizing blogging, podcasting, YouTube, and social networking sites including Facebook and twitter. In addition attendees will learn proper website content management skills and the benefits of partnering with Google to generate awareness.  

For more information visit: www.q1productions.com/healthcarenewmedia 

When: June 15-16^th, 2009 

Where: The Wigwam Golf Resort & Spa, Phoenix, AZ 

Who: The conference is designed for healthcare professionals interested in learning the latest in New Media and web 2.0 techniques. Presenting organizations include: Cleveland Clinic, Duke University Health System, Henry Ford Health System, Mayo Clinic, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Patient Power, LLC, Raven New Media, Baton Rouge General Medical Center, Emory Healthcare, Palomar Pomerado Health 

About the Organizer

Q1 Productions prides itself as leading provider of educational conference and webinar programs for the Health Care industry. Whether focusing on new or pending legislative issues, enhanced business processes or technologies that will drive efficiency and customer service, our conference programs provide solutions to the urgent needs of our attendees.