About a month ago, the market finally fell enough for my wife and I to buy our first house. It’s pretty exciting to finally be able to do it since we pretty much tried to buy a house every year since we moved to Las Vegas 6 years ago. Thankfully, we never did until now (although that’s another story).

After purchasing the home, I found myself spending a fair amount of time having to repair a number of things around the house. One day I pretty much spent all day being a plumber as I (and a nice friend) replaced the garbage disposal, fixed a leaking sink, replaced the mechanism (whatever it’s called) in the toilet. Turns out that none of these things are really all that difficult. Although, it definitely had the initial learning curve for me to realize that it’s pretty straightforward once I got into it.

After spending the day as a plumber on my new house, I couldn’t help but think, “I’m doing the job of a plumber and all I want to really do is blog.”

Many of you are probably wondering what any of this has to do with EMR and healthcare IT. Well, I am the EMR blogger who loves analogies (see marriage and divorce, pregnancy, marriage for money, weight loss, and Katherine posted a Lady or the Tiger one that I enjoyed).

The comparison seems obvious to me. There’s a whole lot of doctors out there that really don’t want to be IT project managers. They don’t want to be EMR implementation specialists. They don’t want to be EMR Contract negotiators. They don’t want to be software evaluation specialists. They want to practice medicine by providing care to patients.

Of course, many of you might easily suggest that I could have paid someone else to do the plumbing and I could stick to the EMR blogging like I want. This is absolutely true. I’m sure there were plenty of plumbers that would have been happy to take my money. Unfortunately, they charge an arm and a leg and I like my limbs. Plus, there’s something valuable about having the knowledge of how something that I’m going to use every day is done.

Extend that to doctors. They could certainly hire an EMR consultant to come and help them do their EMR implementation. In fact, my first job doing EMR was partially to solve this issue. They needed someone who could take care of the EMR implementation from top to bottom. If you find the right person, there’s no doubt that it can work very well. However, similar to the plumber, there’s a cost associated with doing that. Plus, if you use a consultant, you’re outsourcing some of the knowledge and expertise that you would gain if you and your staff put your nose to the grindstone and did it yourself.

Plus, while I can’t say that I particularly enjoy plumbing, I have to admit that there really was an amazing feeling of satisfaction knowing that I was able to accomplish a task which I’d never done before. I think many doctors and clinics have had that same sense of satisfaction after implementing an EMR in their office.

Today I have a special shirt made just for HIMSS, thanks to the great people at Enterprise Software Deployment.

If you see me at HIMSS, check out my shirt. It has the top 10 real reasons I’m at HIMSS listed on the back of the shirt. My favorite is #4 Booth babes. I’ll post the full top 10 later tonight.

Also, be sure to check out Enterprise Software Deployment at HIMSS if you need a great EMR consultant or if you’re looking for a position doing EMR consulting. You can find them at Booth #2777.

Here’s their HIMSS exhibitor description:
At ESD, our goal is to ensure successful implementation of a new EHR system or upgrade from start to finish in healthcare organizations around the globe. Our services include Clinical Transformation, Legacy System Support, Training, Supplemental Staff Augmentations, Clinical and System Transformation, as well as education and training in all aspects of Cerner®, Siemens®, Epic®, Eclipsys®, MEDITECH, and McKesson systems.

Thanks for ESD for sponsoring such a cool shirt for me.

I’ve been thinking about the EMR consulting business model for a long time (check out my first post on EMR consulting back on October 27, 2006). My personal career path has taken me a different direction. I do some occasional consulting for people, but it’s not really my core business. Unfortunately, I don’t scale very well.

With that said, I think there’s definitely a business model for a company that does EMR consulting. In fact, today I learned that one of my advertisers and also an EMR consulting company, Enterprise Software Deployment, was ranked #561 out of the 5000 fastest growing companies in America (see press release).

That’s right. I guess EMR consulting is a good enough business that they can use an EMR consulting business to become one of the fast growing American companies. Plus, I agree with the press release that this next year we’re likely to see EMR consulting grow even more.

While I ABHOR EMR sales people who like to call themselves EMR consultants, I think there’s definitely a place in the EMR industry for qualified EMR consultants. In fact, check out this series of EMR consultant posts where I talk about the possible advantages of using an EMR consultant:
Benefits of Using an EMR/EHR Consultant – Selection Process
Benefits of Using an EMR/EHR Consultant – EMR Training
Benefits of Using an EMR/EHR Consultant – Clinical Process Mapping
Benefits of Using an EMR/EHR Consultant – Comprehensive Technology Support
Benefits of Using an EMR/EHR Consultant – Improved Clinical Buy-in
NOTE: I wrote all these in early 2008. I don’t think too much has changed since then. Although, there are likely more EMR consultant opportunities.

I mentioned previously that I was working on an article about EHR consultants. I wanted to sincerely thank all those people who commented on EHR consultants and sent me feedback on things I should include in my article.

As you’ll see, I used a lot of the feedback that you gave me to form the article. That’s really the power of the internet to bring a bunch of bright people together to create something of far greater value than I could have created on my own. Thank you for your feedback.

I’m told the Magazine has been sent to the presses and those of you who get MDNG magazine will see my article soon (hopefully someone will get one to me). The cool thing is that my article is the cover story for the February issue of MDNG.

For those that don’t want to wait for the magazine or don’t get the magazine, my article on EHR consultants has already been posted online. It’s called: Does Your EHR Consultant Have Your Best Interests in Mind?

Let me know what you think about it.