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

As part of our visit last week, Josh and I made sure to stop in at New York City’s Primary Care Information Project. As today’s press release indicates, PCIP is demonstrating success in promoting electronic health record use among New York City physicians.

There is a component of this work that involves implementation of the personal health record, and we spent time with Melinda Jenkins, Ph.D., FNP, and Joslyn Levy, RN, to learn more about this part of the project. We were given a demonstration of the patient portal that comes bundled with the eClinicalWorks product. As I have seen at the installation in Washington, DC, eCW has relatively robust integration within the EHR for patient access. I have not yet seen this in action personally, but I did speak with Sal Volpe, MD, a user of both the eCW EHR and PHR (see this post for that conversation).

The success that PCIP has achieved has come from focusing on the build for the provider side of the system. We learned that the patient access component is coming with the “Cycle 2″ portion of the project, which was scheduled to be kicked off the day after we visited (good timing!). In the meantime, Melinda and the team have been working on improvements to the out-of-the-box portal to promote self-management and longitudinal care.

Since Melinda is a contributor to this blog (see her posts here), we’ll let her continue to fill in the readership on her work. So far, the news is good from New York that health information technology can be implemented in our care system, even for the most vulnerable populations.

We stopped in to say hi to Mat Kendall, MPH, PCIP’s Director of Operations, and second to none (even including myself, I think) in the optimism department. Mat is a pro at creating visual systems in his office, which he graciously allowed me to photograph and display here, as great examples. Students of the Toyota Management System will appreciate the impact of keeping this work visible. Keep up the great work, New York!

Click on any image to see it full size

A little bit behind on blogging this week, and a little out of order because we’re back in New York City, working with some of the stars we began our journey with.

The quote comes from a conversation I had with one of those individuals, Sal Volpe, MD, who now as part of his process of care, regularly prints his full progress notes and gives them to every single patient. Sal’s board certified in Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, and Geriatrics, and is running the eClinicalWorks EHR in tandem with its patient portal. And this is how we got connected.

When I knew we were coming up, I learned from fellow blogger (on here) Melinda Jenkins, that there was a physician who had the eCW portal up and running. I of course asked if I could visit, meet, or talk to them, and Sal is him. His practice is located in Staten Island, New York.

Sal has about 50 patients up on the patient portal, out of a panel of about 1,700, so he’s just starting out. But he’s not worried about it - he would be happy with 1,000 patients online. He’s currently running a half-time practice, and prior to his work on the eClinicalWorks project, he’s had experience across a breadth of health plan administration and other physician leadership roles. He’s got a blog (of course), which is at http://ehrphrpatientportal.blogspot.com/.

So I asked him about the case for an EHR, and the case for a patient portal. He talks to a lot of medical groups about this. Given his health plan experience, he has a good understanding of how the benefits accrue in terms of quality, billing, and service, and he’s got optimism for the future.

The quote above says something about small practices’ ability to innovate. Sal told me that he can use the tool of the transparent progress note to communicate about needed prevention or testing not just to the patient but to their families. He knows I’m going to blog about this because I think it is a big deal.

We continue to find a lot of good things happening in New York around health information technology and patient access. More posts on the way…..