First site! Institute for Family Health, based in New York City.

I spent my first day at Sidney Hilman Family Practice Center, shadowing 3 clinicians and flow staff. Pictures are below, click on any to see as a photo album.

I started the day shadowing flow staff (medical assistants) to see how patients are roomed and brought into the practice. They do something I have not seen in my practice, which is assess patient’s learning ability for every new patient, prior to the provider entering the room. They do this via a template that they fill out with the patient. Something I heard a medical assistant tell a patient that I really liked: “Have a nice visit…” - this seemed to be nice stage setting for a good interaction.
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Bookmarks, September 23rd through October 1st:

• HealthNex: Getting Patients to Take Their Medicine: The Challenge of Changing Behavior - Nice discussion on the issues of medication adherence. I’d be interested to know more about what happens at the time of prescription as opposed to the time of dispensing. What’s the role of Ix here?
• U.S. Lags in Health IT Adoption, National Coordinator Says - iHealthBeat - Not good news. There’s a 96/100 chance that your physician will be using paper if she/he is in a small practice.
• Web site to make health info easier to find, follow | ajc.com - A small libraries/health plan parntership - good idea
• Welcome to the Wellness Information Zone - A health plan-libraries partnership in Atlanta. Good news. Mostly repackaged free resources for the public. A good start.
• Vermont Hospital Seeks State Approval To Adopt $57.2M EHR System - iHealthBeat - Fletcher Allen is choosing Epic Systems. Could the entire state benefit? No mention of PHR’s in the article.
• Seattle Health Care Providers Offer Patient-Physician E-mail - iHealthBeat reports on Seattle P-I story on doctor patient e-mail
• Aiming for Independence » Blog Archive » How To Add Wordpress 2.3 Tags To Your Current Theme - Buil in tagging coming to Wordpress. This could change a lot of things about blogging.