The Dark Side of e-Prescribing
What happens when medications are cancelled, but no one ever tells the pharmacist? As I mentioned in my last post, this issue hit home recently. A relative who has multiple physicians started to exhibit worsening symptoms of muscle weakness, hypotension, fatigue, reflux, and shortness of breath that progressed over aContinue Reading
Light at the End of the Tunnel
Work on the monograph is coming along well, and, as the title of this post implies, the end is finally in sight! After having changed many times, the outline and content are stable at eight chapters plus any required appendices. Five chapters have been written, two are in progress andContinue Reading
It’s Been a While…
Well, Hello! Yes, it has been a while since the last post. Thanks to everyone who wrote to ask if everything was okay. Everything is fine. Writing the monograph has proven to be as challenging and as time-consuming as I dreaded it might be. The good news is that IContinue Reading
Progress Report: Knee-Deep in Theories, Workflows, and Software Design
You are probably wondering why there have been so few blog posts in the last few months. Well, it’s because I ran into a classic chicken-egg problem. With the best of intentions and an optimistic outlook, I set out to write a handbook on clinical workflow analysis and workflow applicationContinue Reading
EHR Design: Unintended Consequences and Irreconcilable Differences
Back in the mid-90s, doctors who bought EHR systems were trying to solve specific problems. These early adopters would listen as I listed the many ways that EHR systems would change their lives, acknowledge the issues I raised, then buy an EHR anyway. More often than not, however,Continue Reading
Software Innovation after Meaningful Use
Cell phones made telephone technology much more useful–no more searching for a phone booth or waiting at home for a call. Cell phones quickly evolved, eventually bringing us the much-loved Blackberry. Blackberry smartphones moved beyond calls to encompass a range of communication modes. However, despite the gap in features andContinue Reading
Security Nightmare: Small Practices and Ransomware
For four years, ending in 2004, I was Director of Informatics for the HIV/AIDS clinic at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. During that time I led a project to create an EHR. Starting with one programmer and myself, over the course of my tenure, the staff grew to include an in-houseContinue Reading