Worth a Read: Articles of Interest to the Healthcare IT Field

Performance Improvement Special Report: Part I. The Landscape
By: Mark Hagland
HealthCare Informatics, May, 2007

With the backdrop of an environment that's becoming more demanding and intense every day, pioneering hospitals, medical groups and health systems are making performance breakthroughs that even a few years ago were thought impossible. They are making clear advances in improving patient care quality and safety, redesigning clinical workflow, making their clinicians and staff more efficient than ever, and reaching out to connect data and information across sites, physicians, and communities. The key enabler? The electronic medical record (or electronic health record), say industry experts and leaders at pioneering healthcare organizations.

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Wag the Dog: Is your IT department running the business operations or is your business operations running the IT?
By: Pedro Rivera
HealthCare Informatics, May, 2007

Today's information technology (IT) seems to change every year from one user conference to the next. Your staff attends these professional conferences and comes back energized with the latest software updates. Why does it always seem that your healthcare organization is the only one that has been doing it the same way for the last 20 years and everyone else is so far ahead of the game?

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Team EMR: How to maximize productivity and potential for both the individual and the team
By: Pam Taylor
HealthCare Informatics, May, 2007

The success of EMR teams has been proven — people collectively collaborating on the build, customization, implementation and support of systems and helping to achieve the goals of their healthcare organizations. While an EMR team can be very productive and make tremendous contributions, due to varying levels of experience, knowledge, skills and other factors, individual team members may not work to their potential and may not feel professionally fulfilled. The challenge becomes how to maximize the productivity of the team and the potential of each team member.

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