Our first new Co-Author is Mark Groshek, MD, from Kaiser Permanente, Colorado. He’s a leader nationally in tackling one of the most interesting issues in PCHIT, adolescent care. His first post follows this one and he will be a regular contributor about his experiences.

This blog is an experiment. It’s the chronicle of a journey of discovery around patient centered health information technology. Josh Seidman and I have been witnessing experiences at the practice level in health care organizations and talking about them here. This blog is not about Josh and Ted’s journey, alone, though.

What we also wanted to do was have the organizations themselves talk about their own experiences over time, with us. Therefore, as I have gone to each site, I have asked for a volunteer leader from each to blog with us. The leader can be a physician, nurse, any care provider. It can be a patient. This is a person that would talk about their experiences supporting patient-centered health information technology - including Personal Health Records and Information Therapy - the good times, the we wish things were better times, and the “what do we do now?” times. This is the benefit of the blog platform - it is not good at describing perfection - it’s great at describing a little bit of improvement every day.

Why do this?

There is so much work going on in this area, but very few places where organizations are talking about what they are doing as they go along. This is partly the nature of a risk averse industry, and partly the nature of time constraints. As I have said in my work, “Our patients don’t expect us to be perfect, they expect us to learn from our mistakes quickly.” I have personally been involved in the telling of my organization’s story via a blog on LEAN transformation, and we have been amazed at the response. People want to know that their health care system is working to improve every day.

Our Co-Authors will come from diverse care systems and demonstrate that this work isn’t easy, but we don’t do it because it’s easy. The idea is that others working in this area will be able to hear about people just like them supporting patient-centered care through technology.

Feel free to post comments to our Co-Authors, which they will get and respond to right on this blog. As more Co-Authors come on board, we will introduce them here. Welcome, Mark!