5 Years of EMR Blogging Later

It’s really hard for me to believe that today marks the fifth anniversary of EMR and HIPAA. It’s pretty fun to look back at my very first EMR and HIPAA post on December 11, 2005. I definitely haven’t focused all that much on college health, but otherwise I find it pretty amazing that my goal of posting EMR and HIPAA information and driving discussion from other people has held strong for 5 years now.

My second post makes me laugh too. It is some technical details about Wireless technology and security. I’m a little uncomfortable linking to it since it has changed some since 2005. For example, hiding the SSID doesn’t offer much security and can actually cause some connectivity issues if you do implement it. It was the best I knew at the time and it illustrates my original motivation for the blog: to learn!

My third post talks about my wish to have electronic signatures on a tablet. I never got my EMR vendor to implement it for me, but they did implement it with a signature pad like you might find at Walmart. One of the best technologies that I implemented since it helped get rid of so much paper and scanning. Although, many EMR vendors back in 2005 were reticent to implement it since their tests told them that it would cause more trouble for the front desk than actually help. I ignored that and pushed it forward anyway. One time I walked by a 70 year old lady signing the pad and filling out her paperwork on a kiosk and a little part of me smiled.

My fourth post on “What’s an interface?” is still a good read today. I’m glad to see that at least some of my content has withstood the test of time. As far as interfaces, I wish I’d known then what I knew now. After that post and looking into the lab interface, it took us 1+ years to finally implement the lab interface. I am glad we took our time to really thoroughly test it since it was a new interface. Although, if I would have known the incredible benefit of having the bi directional lab interface, I’d have driven that project A LOT faster. The comments on the post also make me laugh since even today I get irked by EMR sales mis communications (lies).

My fifth post I learned about the good and bad parts of having open comments. In the post I talk about which database is best for an EMR software. You’ll see in the comments that R. Terry Ellis (who I interacted with and learned a lot from at the time) kind of took me to task on a comment I’d made about MySQL on Windows. You’ll also note that even in the beginning that I wasn’t one to avoid 2. being wrong and 2. exploring a discussion around a topic. I still LOVE how readers hold me accountable for what I say. Not to mention how much they teach me.

I’m a little embarrassed by my sixth post about problem lists in an EMR. As I read it, I can tell that I was treading lightly since I was trying to write about and discuss something for which I had very little knowledge. I still feel that way about certain topics. However, I’ve learned a bit over these 5 years. It is interesting to see that even in these early posts I was interested in the idea of “Selecting the Right EMR.” I thought I learned that over time, but I guess not.

Thanks for letting me reminisce. It’s fun for me to go back and look at these old posts. It’s amazing that a bored holiday project has come so far. I’ve often recounted that my original two goals with EMR and HIPAA were to:
-Make it to the Top of Google for the search term EMR (Google validates nerds like me)
-Become an Expert of EMR (and have a way to show it)

I made it to the first page of Google for the term EMR within the first 6 months. I’ll let you, the readers, decide if I’m an expert of EMR or not. Either way, I’m glad to now call myself a full time blogger and internet entrepreneur and I’m thankful that EMR and HIPAA is my cornerstone.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • Congratulations on the long run; like wine, your blog only gets better by the day. Glad that you like what you are doing and at the end of the day that’s what matters. Add to that, if people like and read what you do……………… that’s the icing on the cake. Good luck John and keep up the good work.

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