The Genie Industries video is especially compelling because everything they discuss is applicable in health care. What if we substituted “patient care” for making scissor lifts - we would see huge strides in improvement. Also, just upgraded the software that powers this blog. Viva open source.

• Genie Industries, Spotlight - A nice video of Genie Industry's work promoting LEAN and the customer focus in its manufacturing efforts
• Popularity Context Plugin Fix for Wordpress 2.5 -
• The Wisdom of Patients: Health Care Meets Online Social Media - CHCF.org -
• From Al Gore?s Chief Speechwriter: Simple Tips for a Damn Good Presentation (Plus: Breakdancing) - Great advice on giving presentations. The one I like best - it’s not about you, it’s about the audience.

I have been intrigued by EMC’s work in managing an employee personal health record - it seems above and beyond (in a good way) how an human resources function and grow and support talent. Also, time to upgrade Office for Mac. It went OK. I’ll update “my own CIO” tools list in the near future.

• Employers Find Benefits with PHRs - More info about EMC and its employee PHR
• News - - Gainesville.com: Dean admits student without backing - It’s interesting that this is posted in the entertainment section. That aside, this looks concerning. I don’t understand how a student is admitted to medical school on a personal recommendation, and without taking the MCAT. How will we have a diverse medi
• Event Calendar - A way to put upcoming events on a wordpress blog
• TimeDriver - Coming Soon! A revolutionary online personal appointment scheduler - A very high potential meeting scheduling package. Given that Timebridge only allows 5 slots to be determined, this looks very interesting.
• GE Healthcare-Press Release-NCHL and GE’s Institute for Transformational Leadership - I didn’t know about GE’s work in this area. It looks like they are doing work in LEAN as well as Six-Sigma, which they are known for.
• Report cites UA med school crisis | www.azstarnet.com ® - Sad news from my alma mater, related to the difficulties medical schools are having balancing revenue and their mission.
• D.C. Not-for-Profit Offers Model for IT Adoption - iHealthBeat - More progress in DCPCA’s EHR adoption efforts
• Burlington Free Press.com | Fletcher Allen’s new EHR - Fletcher Allen in Vermont gets approval to go ahead. I believe this is an Epic Systems install, bringing with it the possibility for excellent patient engagement with their health system as a result.
• Database Problem with Office 2008 for Mac - Office 2008 Install problems, just in case

April 5th through April 8th:

• Headzoo » WP Anti-Wares - Now it looks like we have to worry about insecure wordpress themes, too.
• Electronic Prevention - washingtonpost.com - Nice writeup of the New York PCIP program. What the writer doesn’t realize, is that a patient portal is coming, so a visit isn’t always going to be required….
• Jack and Suzy Welch: Leader vs. Manager - ‘We’d wager it only comes into play when you don’t want to offend an employee who crosses t’s and dots i’s but couldn’t excite a busload of kids bound for Disney World. In such a case, what do you say? You got it. “You’re a good manager.”‘
• Generation Y’s Bad Rap - It’s not really that bad, according to Jack Welch. I agree.
• The National Physicians Alliance encourages all doctors to join our Unbranded Doctor Campaign — a national network of physicians committed to reducing the influence of pharmaceutical marketing on our profession. - NPA appears to be a grown up version of AMSA. They include consumers in their governance
• Macworld | Mac OS X Hints | Add more power to 10.5’s screen sharing - Economical screen sharing alternatives using Leopard
• Total Value, Total Return: Invest in Health Management Programs -
• Office 2004 for Mac Solution Center - Office 2004 downloads for Mac. Time to upgrade

The one thing that I haven’t quite been able to do well is scheduling meetings with people not on the same computer network. Come to think of it, I never figured out how to do it on the same network either. I looked at some tools below that are emerging that let you do that. I think the most promising looking one is Timebridge. They are also part of the iCal consortium, which supports calendaring standards.

• Talaria Publications - Bibliography for messaging using devices (cell phone, beeper, etc) in promoting medication adherence
• Free Scheduling Software | Integrate Outlook, Google Calendar & Exchange Availability - TimeBridge - I think this one is my favorite.
• Online Invitation service from MeetingWizard.com -
• Find a time, schedule group meetings, conference calls, virtual meetings, events -
• Meetings: Take Detailed Notes to Earn Bonus Points (and Prevent Boredom) - Fascinating. No one suggests making meetings more productive. Each one of these strategies is a measure of wasted time.

April 1st through April 2nd:

• Pattern Recognition » Blog Archive » I really hate Zotero - Like the concept, wants to improve the implementation
• Medical Home | Solution to Chronic Care Management? | Health Care | Disruptive Innovation for a New Primary Care Model | Center for Health Solutions - Deloitte LLP - Very nice overview of Medical Home, particularly with the rundown of stakeholders in the back, plus the medical home cost model.
• WordPress ? Support » Tags Import As Numbers, Not Words - Importing issues Wordpress
• Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008 ? Co-produced by TechWeb & O’Reilly Conferences, April 22 - 25, 2008, San Francisco, CA -
• Compare Accounts | YouSendIt - Store and forward service for the times when e-mail isn’t so efficient. I use XDrive.
• Convert Your Paper to iPaper | Scribd - An ambitious project to convert paper , no extra charge
• John Furrier Says Google?s CIO is Leaving for EMI - Interesting change of employer, could the same thing happen if a Google employee was recruited to run a health care organization?
• Twitter - A Teaching and Learning Tool | ICT in my Classroom - Nice discussion of the uses of Twitter in education
• VoiceThread - Group conversations around images, docs and videos - An interesting image, video, voice annotating service. What are the applicaitons in medical group training and patient involvement

• Safari 3.1 includes hidden one-window preference - This is the holy grail of Safari as the browser of choice. That plus compatibility with blog authoring tools.
• Mac BU promises bibliography improvements to Office 2008 - Interesting discussion somewhat unrelated to the article’s title about the state of bibliographic software. I would look forward to further refinements of Zotero, and maybe a server version.
• QLPlugins - Quick Look Plugins - Great efficiency improver of one of my favorite Leopard features.
• Aetna Smartsource Demo - Aetna’s latest information tailoring system for patients. Getting closer to supporting the patient-provider relationship?
• Apple - Support - Discussions - Unresponsive Keyboard and Trackpad … - This is a real issue for MacBookPro owners - prepare yourself just in case this happens to you.
• A new snapshot of health consumerism from EBRI and The Commonwealth Fund - Nice overview from Jane Sarsohn-Kahn
• Roblog » Batch Categories - Another category management plugin, for Wordpress 2.3 and 2.5
• uwMike » WP-Cats - More preparation to migration to WP 2.5
• Disk Inventory X - Map your hard drive to avoid wasting space
• How to Fly Without ID and Skip Lines | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss - Just in case this happens to you, here is how you can fly and recover.

Quite possibly.

I didn’t catch the iPhone SDK launch right on March 6, but I did watch it a few days later, and it’s very impressive. It is worth a watch, especially with regard to the possibilities in verticals such as health care. I have met many physicians in the past 6 months who have told me, “I will get an iPhone when…” I think the “when” has been answered. Possibilities such as secure physician-patient communication and patient activity monitoring with direct connect to electronic health records are now possible.

It was interesting to see this right after the Health2.0 Conference, to be sure.

Not to mention that the iPhone is now enterprise-worthy….

Apple Developer Connection - iPhone Dev Center - iPhone Developer Program

• iCal Reply Checker | John Maisey - A little tweak for my own CIO to work with exchange clients
• Five whys - Quick guide to using the Five Why’s technique to get to root cause in strategy deployment
• Fishbone diagrams - Handy guide to using this hoshin kanri tool
• Common Examples of Healthcare IT Failure - Interesting case studies of HIT that didn’t go so well
• Definitions of Medical Informatics - Useful observations on the role of medical and nursing professionals in informatics
• Presentation Zen: FEMA chart becomes brunt of joke. - Jon Stewart brings chartjunk to light in his comments on FEMA
• Cravens Advertising - Ten Things > Disaster Chart - Infamous FEMA Disaster Chart, example of Powerpoint chartjunk

I’m adding another tool - VoIP, in the form of Skype. As it so happens, they released a brand new version in anticipation of my jump into this new world:

Skype 2.7 for Mac is here. - Skype for Mac

I have been looking around and noticed that there isn’t a good guide anywhere for optimizing Skype on the Macintosh, so I thought I would share what I know here based on my testing. Thanks to those of you who I have spoken with in the last few weeks who either knew or didn’t know that you were on a VoIP connection when I said I was calling from my landline :).

Overall quality is great with a fast computer and good internet connection. Here are my tips:

To test your Internet connection, you can use a free service like MySpeed VoIP quality test.

For your router, you can do things like adjust port forwarding and give priority to your Skype connection. I tried all combinations of this and ended up using the built in Quality of Service settings, in other words, no special tweaking.

On the mac, the big issue affecting quality turned out to be concurrent use of Bluetooth. I haven’t seen anything posted about this, but using a bluetooth mouse and keyboard at the same time as Skype causes the machine to hiccup periodically during the connection. Using a bluetooth headset, while possible, resulted in poor quality. Turning bluetooth off altogether during calls preserved excellent quality. I think having 1-3 bluetooth devices running off the machine causes CPU conflicts rather than bandwidth conflicts.

In terms of hardware, there are good choices for the PC, such as the GE - Skype - Certified - 2 in 1 Internet&Standard Phone, and the Linksys Cordless Internet Telephony Kit for Skype CIT200 Unfortunately, neither of these have Macintosh drivers (yes there are some things on the Mac that aren’t plug and play), so they won’t work. In addition, the “line in” port on a MacBookPro is not the same as “Microphone”. The former requires a powered microphone, the latter does not. So you can’t buy a microphone-enabled headset and plug it to these jacks. You need a USB headset.

Just a few things I figured out on this journey. I love the iPhone and all the things it does for me, but when you join the masses of people who no longer have a true land line in their home, Skype is a great way to manage the declining pool of rollover minutes that you have built up.

Anyone else using Skype or VoIP with good results (or not so good results?). Post them here!

February 7th through February 9th:

• Turning Chrysler Into Toyota - A classic misunderstanding of how Toyota excels, and a misunderstanding of LEAN. Toyota doesn’t lay off and cut to excel. It invests and improves, and respects.
• Technology Helps Hospitals Enhance Consent Forms - iHealthBeat - The title says it all. Giving consumers a chance to understand treatment options.
• JAY PARKINSON MD MPH | Polaroid, Health Plans, and Dinosaurs - Jay says they have a lot in common.
• Google Apps Team Edition - Going Viral on Companies - In the future, should enterprise IT use hosted apps? I think it’s worth a try.