• Health Populi: Forget ER, Gray’s Anatomy, or even House; the Life and Times of an American Doctor feel more like The Biggest Loser - With the newer tools that we now have for physicians to interact with patients, isn't it possible that we could create a results only work environment for physicians? How different is BestBuy corporate from an ambulatory medical office?

• 6 Reasons to Start Coworking - I see this as a supplement to ROWE.

• Guide To Working Paperless | TECH cocktail - Another recipe for using modern tools to stay productive, a la Results Only Work Environment

Throwing Out the Rules of Work | workforce.com - More press for Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) at BestBuy:

“You start looking at everything and saying, ‘Is this really going to help get me to my desired outcome?’ ” Ressler says. “Pretty soon you’ve cut out 10 of those unnecessary things that used to fill up your week, and you’re getting a lot more done.”

Best Buy is so enamored of ROWE that it is in the process of marketing the system to other companies, and is even considering trying a modified version in its retail stores. There are skeptics who wonder whether ROWE will work outside of a relatively homogenous corporate campus.

It’s a 6 month process, and the steps are detailed in the article. What works in retail or in the professional environment of BestBuy’s corporate campus should work in health care, especially in professions where workload management by the clock makes less sense. Agree?

• Tapping the Creativity of All Workers - More interesting happenings at BestBuy - "TagTrade" an electronic stockmarket of employee assessment of management decisions.

HP Halo: Listen to what people are saying about Halo

This seems very interesting in a Results-Only Work Environment - a lifelike telepresence (also known as videoconferencing) system, Halo, made by HP. I used to think that these were not useful, but I had read about Halo before after trying video meetings, which were useful, when the setup was easy.

See what you think.

Video: Bringing the world to your table |HP

…and Businessweek just wrote another article about this (telepresence) last week, as well.

And then there were none? An internist’s reflections — Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine - Request for commentary on “A Medical Center is Not a Hospital”.

I’ll just put mine here, I’m sure through the magic of Google blog search it will find its way. I think the story is sad and an opportunity. Today’s physicians don’t really have a choice except to do the things we are qualified to do best, which includes bringing the patient experience forward, in every conversation. I haven’t really met anyone who wasn’t interested in the patient experience in any part of health care (or they wouldn’t be here). I have met people who didn’t know what the patient experience was - that’s the opportunity.

I tagged this post with “ROWE” (result-only work environment) because part of the opportunity is to change the health care system so it is less about providing health care (internally focused) and more about getting results for patients. In the process, the people who work in health care may have work lives that are more tied to getting results than in being in a certain place at a certain time, so they can get results for themselves and their families, too.

I’ll stop there and see what other people think.

e-patients: Safety Net Populations

The nice thing about the blogosphere is that when you get behind in your blogging, someone else will help you out. Thanks to Susannah Fox for writing about her experience with us in Oakland, California, around the sharing of Pew Research Data with safety net health care organizations.

The comments on the post are especially heartening, in that they support that involving the audience in the presentation of information is meaningful. In this case, they presented just as much information back, which is as it should be.

If I can have one claim to fame in the convening world, besides audience involvement, it is that internet access, checking e-mail, using the Web is allowed at the discretion of attendees. At the last two meetings where I suggested this, people seemed a little caught off guard that this is okay. I want to change that. Just as in the Results-Only Work Environment, in the Results-Only Meeting Environment, respect for people deciding what is most important to them creates the pressure I like, that I/we need to be more interesting than an e-mail inbox.

I am going through new employee orientation here in Oakland, California, and was taken by these images on a conference room wall. They are of Sidney Garfield, MD, one of the founders of Kaiser Permanente, and a selection of his drawings.

As I wrote earlier on this blog, I think it’s really important to learn about where we came from as a profession so we can best think about where we are going. I wrote about the writings of Sidney Garfield in another post (you can see that, and a link to his Scientific American article here). Dr. Garfield was a medical leader who was focused on happy patients and happy doctors, unencumbered by financing mechanisms in his thinking.

I thought the concept of “Rationally Organized Medicine” was really interesting; could it be connected to a concept of “Results Only Medicine” (as determined by patients) in 2008? See what you think.

• The Health Wisdom Blog™ (by OrganizedWisdom): The Getting Results Toolkit: 41 Essential Tools You Need To Build a Green Start-up and Go 100% Virtual - Organized Wisdom details its ROWE (can I call it that officially?) setup. Tips on going paperless and staying virtual.