New Post on HCBPM.com: AppianWorld 2012 Trip Report, Just In Time For AppianWorld 2013 (Plus Ten Questions)

By chuckwebster | Published: April 29, 2013

I published a new, and quite lengthy, blog post on my Healthcare Business Process Management blog. Check it out!

AppianWorld 2012 Trip Report, Just In Time For AppianWorld 2013 (Plus Ten Questions)

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My Tenuous EHR Workflow Content Curation Connection to Anthony D. Weiner

By chuckwebster | Published: April 30, 2013

I never thought I’d write a blog post with a title mentioning Anthony D. Weiner. I saw a story about him in the New York Times. The first paragraph mentioned his helping an EMR company. So I tweeted the following tweet.

tweet

The mentioned EMR company rang a bell. Ahh! I remember them. Last year I got a Google alert for EMR and workflow. I found a blog post (see below, my content in red and vendor name blurred) describing a white paper I wrote in 2003 (Could You Do Me a Favor? “Electronic Medical Record Workflow Management: The Workflow of Workflow”) . For a decade it’s been at the top of the first page of search results returned by Google for the search terms EMR and workflow. The problem is, the blog post didn’t attribute the content to me. And it didn’t provide a link back to my white paper. I was a bit miffed.

emr-workflows-image-blurred3

Even the workflow wordle comes another of my blog posts. It comes from my The High-Performance Medical Home and Pediatric and Primary Care EMR Workflow Systems: Key Ideas. Again, not attributed. Not linked.

And then I just forgot about it. Until now. Coincidently, I recently saw an excellent presentation about Content Curation. Here are the key tweets. But the tweet I will focus on is the last one, about Curation Ethics. Hmm. I feel a teachable moment coming on…

Lisa Rhodes of @VerneGlobal and Pawan Deshpande (@TweetsFromPawan) of Curata (@Curata) gave an excellent overview of curating content on the web as a powerful form of marketing.

They quoted Rohit Bhargava (@rohitbhargava):

“A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.”

Great definition!

And there was this, Content Curation & Fair Use. Let’s see how the blog post fares!

First of all, let me direct to you the blog post referenced by the slide.

Content Curation & Fair Use: 5 Rules to being an Ethical Content Curator

The following summarizes the five rules.

  1. Do not reproduce article in entirety.
  2. Limit yourself to articles directly relevant to your audience.
  3. Prominently identify source of article.
  4. Link to original source of article.
  5. Provide context/commentary for the material you use.

OK. The blog post did not reproduce my white paper in entirety. Check!

It limited itself (to the best of my knowledge) to my one white paper (well, plus the wordle from another of my blog posts). Check.

The blog post *does not* prominently identify my white paper or me. X! (Zzzzz! )

The blog post *does not* link to the original source of the blog post content. X! (Zzzzz! )

And did the blog post provide additional valuable valuable context and commentary? I don’t think so either.

I briefly considered contacting the blog author or EHR sponsor, but just didn’t think it was worth the effort. I was also irritated when that blog post displaced my white paper from the pole position in Google. But, I believed, correctly as it turns out, that Google would eventually figure out which content was a paraphrase of which content and which predated which. I’m back on top! At least for the moment, it’s a bit like playing the game King of the Hill, SEO-wise.

By the way, I intentionally did not mention in *this* blog post the EHR vendor associated with *that* blog post. That’s not its point.

Thank you for giving something to write about, Anthony D. Weiner.

P.S. Yes. I *am* aware of the irony. I used content without attributing it. If the author or sponsoring EHR vendor were to contact me, I’d be delighted to prominently attribute its source and provide a link to it. :)

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May 23rd I’m Giving a Free Webinar “The Power of Process” on Workflow Automation, BPM and Healthcare

By chuckwebster | Published: April 27, 2013

Process-aware technology is invading healthcare by many routes. Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and Language technologies promise to transform healthcare information management for the better. What do they all have in common? I argue it’s behind-the-scenes workflow automation.

Less behind-the-scenes (in other industries) is business process management’s mighty combo of workflow engine, process definition, and graphical editor. Investment in BPM tech is predicted to grow at three times the rate as other industries, mostly because they’ve invested so much already, while healthcare has not.

On May 23rd, at 12:00 noon (EST), I’ve been given a bully pulpit to proselytize for process-aware information systems in healthcare. Thank you FormFast! By the way, FormFast is a POW!HIT! profile (POW!(er)HIT!(tter)?) on my EHRworkflow.com website extension to my Twitter @EHRworkflow account.

My 45-minute portion of “The Power of Process” is a general introduction (not product-specific) to process-aware workflow management systems and business process management systems in healthcare.

I want to make “The Power of Process” as social as possible. If you follow me on Twitter (or are on Twitter and don’t follow me, for that matter) please let me know you signed up, and then just before the webinar begins. I’ll tweet a shout out!

Below is the webinar description and link to register.

My updated “poster” with three slides!:

free-webinar-power-of-process-webster

My original “poster”:

free-webinar-narrow

Register for “The Power of Process”, part of the FormFast Educational Webinar Series

The Power of Process

As healthcare organizations seek to maximize quality and protect revenue, they have discovered that simply investing in new technologies is not enough to get the results they require. It’s imperative that hospital leaders go the extra mile to analyze and improve the processes that drive the hospital.

Meaningful process improvement can be achieved through workflow automation and business process management (BPM), and their benefits aren’t just limited to clinical areas of the hospital. By automating tasks across the enterprise including supporting and operational processes, the hospital could realize significant cost savings and reduction in liability.

Join us for a free web event featuring healthcare thought leader Charles Webster, MD as he shares his insights into ways hospital leaders can take the next steps toward complete automation.

  • In this webinar, we’ll explore:
  • The need for workflow/BPM in healthcare
  • How other verticals are using these technologies to their benefit
  • Use cases in the clinical space
  • Use cases concerning supporting/operational processes
  • First steps to implementing workflow/BPM

About our Featured Speaker

Charles Webster, MD, MSIE, MSIS is a prolific thought leader in the health and health IT space. Noted by Healthcare IT News as one of the most important bloggers in the healthcare IT community and one of the most active health IT leaders on Twitter, Chuck is known to have his finger on the pulse of the healthcare industry. At the recent HIMSS conference in New Orleans his @EHRworkflow Twitter account was the top influencer on Twitter. You can read his blog, EHR Workflow Management Systems, at http://ChuckWebster.com and follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/EHRworkflow.

With degrees in Accountancy, Industrial Engineering, Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, and Medicine, Dr. Webster’s wide range of expertise gives him a unique and comprehensive view into the healthcare sector. He designed the first undergraduate program in Medical Informatics, was CMIO for an EHR vendor, and wrote the first three award-winning case studies submitted for the HIMSS Davies Award for EHR Ambulatory Excellence. Chuck writes about healthcare workflow and related and unrelated topics from @EHRworkflow on Twitter, ChuckWebster.com, and DMV: the District, Maryland, and Virginia.

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Eliminating Medical Error #TEDMED #GreatChallenges Workshop Annotated Twanscript

By chuckwebster | Published: April 26, 2013

On Friday, April 19th, I was one of 20 TEDMED Social Media Narrators assigned to twenty Great Challenges workshops. I was assigned to, and live-tweeted from, Eliminating Medical Errors. Here are my tweets. I’ve changed their order to reflect common themes and annotated where necessary or useful. There were lots of retweets from folks not in the workshop or at TEDMED, and lots of replies too.

First off, here we are! Can you spot me?

And here is the final workshop statement. (I told you I was going to change the order of the tweets. This way if you don’t read this whole post, you’ll still have gotten the maximum value for your effort thus far. By the way, this is called a “greedy algorithm” in computer science.)

A message to my Twitter followers so they have an inkling of why I am suddenly flooding their Twitter stream with tweets about #MedicalError…

The Eliminating Medical Errors workshop was first addressed by Helen Haskell, the founder of Mothers Against Medical Error. Her Twitter account is @HHask.

The following was an interesting comment: “Don’t let get ‘baked’ into EHRs.” It was said in passing, as part of list of calls for government action, technological innovation, and then the “baked” in comment. I believe, though cannot be sure, this was a reference to published reports of medical error due to EHR (mis-)design, (mis-)implementation, and (mis-)use. I’ll not revisit that debate here, except to note that, on the whole, I’d describe workshop participants as cautiously optimistic about the potential for electronic health records to reduce medical error. But they also recognized the potential for EHRs to be part of the problem too.

The following clump of tweets revolves around the theme of design, transparency and incentives.

Excuse the typo in the following tweet. I meant, “Transparency is Transformative.” I’m guessing the RTers figured that out. Or maybe not! Maybe there is transparency in transformation…

Well, you get the idea! Feel free to browse the rest of the tweets. I enjoyed the whole experience immensely.

Thank you TEDMED!

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Post-TEDMED Ruminations About Social Media, Workflow, HatCam Interviews and SMACWL

By chuckwebster | Published: April 25, 2013

I usually write a comprehensive trip report in which I try to synthesize major themes. But many folks beat me to that punch, and did great jobs to boot. So I refer you to the following blog posts about patients, data, and big ideas.

This post is mostly a place to reminisce about my experience as a “Social Medial Narrator” at TEDMED (I Received Social Media Credentials to Cover 2013 TEDMED!), include some of my increasingly notorious HatCam One-Minute Interviews (”Hey! You’re the HatCam guy!), and talk about SMACWL tech (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, Workflow and Language technologie) as it relates to TEDMED’s “The Hive” showcase of healthy IT startups.

Speaking of HatCam, there it is, that little black dot hovering just above my right eye, attached to a red ball cap. I tweeted out One-Minute Video interviews during TEDMED. Their tweets are embedded at the end of this blog post.

As I put it just before TEDMED…

And there certainly were! Below I compare #TEDMED and #HIMSS13 Twitter statistics. Over roughly the same duration, three-and-a-half days, #TEDMED garnered more people generating more tweets and impressions (about the same number of tweets per person and less than half the number of tweets per hour — no, I don’t know how to reconcile that!).

tedmed-himss

I was one of 20 (”The Tweetin’ Twenty!”) TEDMED Great Challenge Social Media Narrators. I contributed 243 tweets on the #TEDMED hashtag (putting me in the top ten most prolific tweeters) and 80 tweets on the #GreatChallenges hashtag. Most of these latter tweets were during the Eliminating Medical Errors workshop to which I was assigned.

Funny thing about walking around, as I did, with a camera on my head. It attracted what Ervin Goffman, a famous micro-sociologist, called “civil inattention”. Unlike HIMSS, where the reaction was “Cool! You’ve got a camera on your head!” at TEDMED the reaction was “(I’m ignoring the camera on your head because nothing here surprises me and I’m sure you have a good reason for wearing it there.)” On the other hand, I could march up to anyone, any booth, into any workshop, and say: “I’m one of twenty TEDMED social media narrators. Do you mind if I…” and each and every time the crowd would part like the Red Sea.

There was an interesting episode in the Eliminating Medical Error workshop. I was typing away. My netbook has LOUD keys. Tickety-Tickety-Tickety. And I’m tweeting about some very emotional and sad stuff. Folks not even attending the workshop, or TEDMED for that matter, are retweeting and replying to me. I’m retweeting, replying, viewing links, as appropriate. And then I clicked on a link to a very loud video. And my netbook’s sound was at max. And everyone in the workshop stopped and turned around a looks at me.

I turned a bit red and explained that as I’m tweeting zeitgeist I’m getting lots of reactions. Sympathetic tweets. Outraged tweets. Tweets to blog posts with similar stories. And that I’d just clicked on a link to a video someone tweeted to me. No, I hadn’t wandering off and surfed irrelevant material.

Tickety-Tickety-Tickety. I definitely got the feeling that folks were aware of me, aware I was tweeting, aware the workshop discussants had a world-wide audience. (I included the above tweet to make the point. The sound of people tapping on laptop keys really is a kind of applause.) At one point, someone paused, looked at me, and said, dramatically, “Don’t tweet what I’m about to say.” (No, I won’t tell you.) Kinda like when the judge says to a stenographer, “Strike that from the record!”

At another point I felt the need to shift from dispassionate reporter to contributing participant. I timidly raised my hand among several. There was an intense discussion going on. The excellent workshop leader interrupted the discussion, ignored others whose hands went up before mine, and said, “Is there something urgent on social media?” (in a sincere, not sarcastic tone). I felt sort of bad to disappoint everyone, “No, I just wanted to add a thought to the discussion….”

About SMACWL. (TEDMED “The Hive” Companies and The Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, Workflow and Language Technologies) These are my mental keywords I use to categorize, sort, and aggregate interesting startups and technologies. Twenty-three of the companies that TEDMED showcased in “The Hive” ended up with SMACWL profiles in the EHRworkflow.com website. I had lots of fun tweeting links to these #SMACWL profiles and the online interactions that followed.

Two observations about the twenty-three companies for which I created profiles. First, every one of SMACWL categories ended up with at least a couple startups — except language tech! Companies focusing on natural language processing (the engineering) and computational linguistics (the science) weren’t represented. I’m not sure what to make of this. Natural language processing systems rely on machine learning applied to massive amounts of natural language text. Natural language processing (and speech recognition) make possible different and innovative user interfaces for both clinicians and patients. It will be interesting to compare next year’s TEDMED “The Hive” companies with this years in this respect.

The second observation is about workflow. Since I tweet about healthcare workflow (closing in on 20,000 tweets!) and blog about healthcare workflow (over 200 posts on this blog), I’m always looking for the workflow angle. The two TEDMED “The Hive” companies that stood out, to me, in this regard are Starling and Sense Health:

In each case I dug around their website to pull out the bit that I think should interest folks who follow me or read my blog because they are interested in workflow technology in healthcare. Interesting stuff! Love to hear your thoughts!

Finally, here are my HatCam One-Minute Interviews (including one of me, hat in hand, literally).

…

I arrived at The Kennedy Center before 7:00 AM on the 19th. And promptly “HatCam’ed” myself. Where’s the hat? It’s in my hand!

First thing, I had to get some One-Minute Interviews tweeted:

Not sure why the above YouTube preview doesn’t auto-expand, so here is a photo to show you how nice and friendly Pat Salber appears and is!

Hmm. I wonder if Google Glass will make my HatCam obsolete. Eventually, I suppose, my HatCam might become like a hood ornament (my “brand”, so to speak) or the figurehead on a ship (menacing evil spirits and conveying my wealth and power :) ).

Thank you for reading (or at least, skipping) to the very end of this piece!

As always, yours truly, and you can follow me at…


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