Doctors Learning to Speak "Iowan"

From Iowa Public Radio: Doctors Learning to Speak Iowan at Mercy Medical Center in Mason City, IA.

"Learning to speak English is one thing, learning to speak Iowan may be something else entirely. Iowa, especially in its more rural areas, has many foreign-born physicians practicing in clinics and hospitals. On today's program, we’ll find out about an innovative program in Mason City that helps doctors understand our state with courses like "Topics for Small Talk with Iowans." We'll talk to the teachers in the program at Mercy Medical Center North Iowa, Univ. of Northern Iowa professors Mark Grey and Michele Devlin. We'll also hear from the man who devised the program, Dr. David Little, and Family Medicine Residents Dr. Sreevalli Dega and Dr. Anileen Prabhakaran."

Comments

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...

gapingvoid cartoon #378

Buy your own, here.

"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information ...

Health Care Strategist

Search This Blog