By Rob Lamberts, MD

This, apparently, is a map of my mind.  It’s a little shocking to find out that my mind looks like a sea creature, a bug, or perhaps a vegetable.  Actually, “Rob’s mind” and “vegetable” are often used in the same sentence.

Someone suggested to me that I may benefit from mind mapping.  I don’t know how to describe it, but I think spatially; I see things abstractly as if I am pulling up from the ground and getting an aerial view of things.  I write that way, I solve problems that way, I even play music that way.  Maybe it’s tapping on the right side of the brain that is about nuances or about how things relate to other things in proximity or direction.  Like I said: it’s hard to describe.

Anyhow, I was thinking about task-management with my patients, wondering what’s the best way to think about it and what is the best design for a system helping with this.  Task management is perhaps the most important thing in health care that’s never talked about.  Maybe that’s because it makes doctors feel less special, reducing our “magical” knowledge and “miracle” cures to algorithms and checklists.  Personally, I take great comfort in systems because they assure me I am not going to forget important things (like setting a reminder to take the trash out on Sunday and Wednesday nights).

Continue reading “The Good Doctor’s Mind Map”

By Rob Lamberts, MD

It feels dangerous to write this, but…my practice seems to be working.

I am now running and hiding from lightning bolts, meteors, or stray arrows shot in the air by a Scottish soldier.  I am also expecting a raid on my office by the IRS, CDC, and BBC tomorrow morning.  I don’t know why I wrote that.

But as afraid as I am to admit it, the thing that was once just a good idea is now actually growing and improving.  We are up to about 300 patients (with a big infusion when a local TV network did a story on my practice) and have enough money to pay bills without a visit from uncle bouncy.  While we’ve started to discuss when we will hire another staff person (probably a nurse), neither me nor my nurse Jamie (may her name be ever blessed) feel overwhelmed at this point.  We can handle this volume, which speaks well for the future when we actually have a fully-working system.

The past few weeks have been totally consumed by my need to have an underlying system of organization.  After fighting valiantly against the idea for the first two months, I succumbed to the necessity of building my own IT system and have been seeing the many benefits of that decision.  Despite being totally obsessed with how data tables connect and whether I’ve left a parenthesis off of a script I’ve written, I now have a place to put data, have a pretty decent task management system, have an integrated address book, and have discussed integration with my phone system vendor, my secure messaging developer, and a lab order/result integration vendor.  I’ve also found some strong local tech talent who gets what I am doing and yet doesn’t simply see the market potential for my software.

The reality is, my whole focus is on the practice model, and that model seems to work.  As my business and medical care management systems click into place and become more functional, growing the practice should not be a problem.  We continue to get several new patients signing up every day, and now the reluctant spouses of establish patients are joining (which is a very good sign – for both my practice and for their marriages).

Let me appease the gods and state clearly that this is by no means a sure thing.  There are many, many things that could go wrong.  A successful start-up requires not only a good idea and hard work; it also needs requires luck (or at least to avoid bad luck).  I could get cancer, my building could burn down, or our city could be overrun by a mob of psychotic llamas.  We all know the llama apocalypse is happening; it’s just a question of when, not if.   So I accept the fact that I am, to a great extent, in the hands of the fates (and llamas).

Continue reading “The Doctor Is Happy”

By Rob Lamberts, MD

There was a hole in the wall of our bathroom that was a painful reminder of a bad encounter with a plumber.  Yes, that hole has been there about a year, and it has been on my to-d0 list for the duration, daring me to show if I inherited any of the fix-it genes I got from my father.  Why not hire someone to come fix it?  I also got (as I mentioned in my last post) dutch genes, which scream at me whenever I reach for my wallet.  So this hole was giving me shame in surround-sound.

I attempted to fix it the hole last year, even going to the degree of asking for  a router table for my birthday.  Since there was previously no way to get to this all-important access to the shower fixture without cutting through the sheetrock, I decided I would take a board, cut it larger than the hole, then use the router to make a rabbet cut so the panel would fit snuggly.  Up until then, I thought a rabbet cut was a surgery to keep the family pet population under control, but my vocabulary was suddenly expanded to include words like rabbet, roundover, chamfer, dado and round nose. Unfortunately, my success only came in the realm of vocabulary, as I was not able to successfully master the rabbet cut without making the wood become a classic example of the early american gouge woodworking style.

I am not sure why, but something inside me told me today was the day to give this another shot, and to my shock (and that of my family), I was successful!

This home project is actually a late comer to the DIY party I’ve been holding for the past few months.

• Don’t like your practice?  Build your own from scratch!
• Don’t like the health care system, build a new one!

My latest DIY venture is in an area I swore I’d not go: I’m building my own record system.

Continue reading “The DIY Electronic Medical Record”

By Rob Lamberts, MD

It’s been a long time since I wrote a post.  My life, you see, is incredibly dull and boring.  There has been so little to write about that I’ve been at a loss.

No, actually that’s a load of crap.  It’s become a fantasy of mine to have such boredom.  In reality, my life is as un-boring as it could be.  It’s like the part of a story where everything is in flux, where little decisions have huge consequences, and where the inflection point between a comedy and tragedy is located.

So how’s my new practice going?  In some ways things are going about as well as they could.  My patients are amazed when I answer their emails or (even more surprisingly) answer the phone.  ”Hello, this is Dr. Lamberts,” I say.  This usually results in a long pause, followed by a confused and timid voice saying something like, “well…uh…I was expecting to get Jamie.”  Yet I am often able to deal with their problems quickly and efficiently, forgoing the usual message from Jamie to get to the root of their problem.  It’s amazingly efficient to answer the phone.

Financially, the practice has been in the black since the first month, and continues to grow, albeit slowly.  The reason for the slow growth is not, as many would predict, the lack of a market for a practice like mine.  It’s also not that I am so busy at 250 patients that growth is difficult.  In truth, when we aren’t rapidly adding new patients, the work load is nowhere near overwhelming for just me and my nurse.  In that sense I’ve proved concept: that it’s not unreasonable to think I can handle 500, and even 1000 patients with the proper support staff and system in place.

Which brings us to the area of conflict, the crisis point of this story: the system I have in place.  The hard part for me has been that I have not been able to find tools to help me organize my business so it can run efficiently.

Continue reading “The Electronic Medical Record and the Patient Narrative”

By Brian Klepper

What is the path forward for physicians who want to remain in private practice, outside the constraints of health system employment? How will the environment change and what new demands will that place on practices and physicians? What follows are the observations of one industry-watcher who has worked on all sides of health care, but who now spends most his time focused on the interests of those who pay for it. No crystal ball, but several trends are clear.

There are now concrete signs that health care’s purchasers are exhausted and seeking new solutions, that a competitive marketplace is emerging and getting increasing traction. As they abandon ineffective approaches, the paradigm that has dominated the industry for the past 50 years will be upended. The financial pressure felt by buyers will transfer to the supply side health industry that has come to take ever more money for granted.

For decades, fee-for-service payment, inclusive health plan networks, and a lack of quality, safety and cost transparency have been enforced by health industry influence over policy, effectively neutralizing the power of market forces.

Without market pressure, physicians have felt little need to understand their own performance relative to that of their peers. The variation of physician practice patterns within specialties has been high, with some physicians’ “optimizing their revenue opportunities” by veering wildly away from evidence-based practice. Even so, until recently in this dysfunctional environment, it has been nearly impossible to identify high and low performers.

Continue reading “How Physician Practices Can Prepare for a Health Care Marketplace”

By Leslie Kernisan, MD

A few weeks ago, The Health Care Blog published a truly outstanding commentary by Jeff Goldsmith, on why practice redesign isn’t going to solve the primary care shortage. In the post, Goldsmith explains why a proposed model of high-volume primary care practice — having docs see even more patients per day, and grouping them in pods — is unlikely to be accepted by either tomorrow’s doctors or tomorrow’s boomer patients. He points out that we are replacing a generation of workaholic boomer PCPs with ”Gen Y physicians with a revealed preference for 35-hour work weeks.” (Guilty as charged.) Goldsmith ends by predicting a “horrendous shortfall” of front-line clinicians in the next decade.

Now, not everyone believes that a shortfall of PCPs is a serious problem.

However, if you believe, as I do, that the most pressing health services problems to solve pertain to Medicare, then a shortfall of PCPs is a very serious problem indeed.

So serious that maybe it’s time to consider the unthinkable: encouraging clinicians to become Medicare PCPs by aligning the job with a 35 hour work week.

I can already hear all clinicians and readers older than myself harrumphing, but bear with me and let’s see if I can make a persuasive case for this.

Continue reading “An Indecent Proposal That Just Might Solve the Primary Care Crisis: Meet the 35 Hour Work Week”

By Rob Lamberts, MD

I’ve been going about this all wrong.

It’s not my dumping of the payment system so I can focus on care over codes, my use of technology to connect better with patients, or my vision of the “collaborative record” that is wrong. It’s the fact that I am doing this without my most important resource: my patients.

I realized this while driving in to work this past week. My first patient was a tech-savvy guy I’ve known for a long time. Not only does he know me, and knows more than me about technology, he also is a regular reader of my blog (bless his heart)…and he still chose to switch to my practice! So I was looking forward to running some of my ideas by him to see if my thoughts have strayed to the land of silliness (which they often do) or if I am actually onto something. This line of thought led me to think about collaborating with him to work on my IT vision, since he does work for an IT company. My line of thought then careened into the brick wall of the obvious: why just him? I’ve been getting suggestions and offers for help from many of my patients, who are clearly intrigued by my direction and desirous to lend their expertise on the project. So why not involve any of my patients who want to be part of this project?

Continue reading “The True Collaborative Health Record”

By John Halamka, MD

Recently I was asked if SaaS/Cloud computing is appropriate for small practice EHR hosting.

I responded: “SaaS in general is good. However, most SaaS is neither private nor secure. Current regulatory and compliance mandates require that you find a cloud hosting firm which will indemnify you against privacy breeches caused by security issues in the SaaS hosting facility. Also, SaaS is only as good as the internet connections of the client sites.   We’ve had a great deal of experience with ‘last mile’ issues.”

Continue reading “Should Small to Medium-Sized Practices Use Cloud-Based EHR?”

By Rob Lamberts, MD

It’s official.  The road sign clearly welcomed me here.  I guess all business start-ups have to go through this town (Hell).

What?  No bravado?  No chest pounding about how my ideas will change health care while making patients smell as springtime fresh?  Nope.  None of that.  It’s hard to get excited about ideas when only money pays the bills.

Having now left the safe confines of my leftover earnings from my old practice, I am now supposed to be self-supporting.  Two big things have caused this to not go as smoothly as I have planned:

1. My construction took twice as long as I expected.
2. I have yet to find a computer system that doesn’t make me want to pound on my desk and wantonly overuse the word “inconceivable.”

Continue reading “So It Turns Out Inventing Your Own Business Model Is More Fun Than You Were Expecting…”

By Rob Lamberts, MD

Dear HIPAA:

I’m sure you get a lot of hate mail, especially from folks in my profession, so when you got this letter from me you probably assumed it was more of the same. Let me reassure you: I am not one of those docs. I do think patient privacy is important, and actually found you quite useful when facing unwanted probing questions from family members. I believe the only way for patients to really open up to docs like me is to have a culture of respect for privacy, and you are a large part of that trust I can enjoy. Yeah, there was trust before you were around, but that was before the internet, and before people used words like “social media,” and “data mining.”

But there have been things done in your name that I’ve recently come in contact with that make me conclude that either A: you are very much misunderstood, or B: you have a really dark side.

Continue reading “Dear HIPAA: It’s Time to Decide Who You Want To Be”