First things, first, I want to acknowledge fellow-Coloradoan Chuck Blakeman for inspiring me to write this blog. His philosophies about business leadership resonate with me, and much of the content below is a direct reflection of his insights. For years, I’ve thought that my philosophies about corporate culture and beliefs were too unusual to practice openly, but […]
Bring A Laptop To Your Next Doctor’s Appointment
When I started teaching at Northwestern in 2005, it had been a quite a few years since I’d been in an academic setting for anything other than guest lectures. In the time that had expired towards 2005, the students all had laptops and the classrooms had WiFi. I thought the student were taking notes and […]
Eleven Habits of Passionate People
Most of this blog and much of the inspiration originally appeared in LifeHack, one of my favorite web sites, written by Sarah Hansen, one of my favorite writers. I made a few edits and added one more entry — passionate people have a sense of humor. There are a number of clinical studies in the field […]
Five Rules For A Successful Recognition Program
Awards and recognition programs for teammates and employees are a critically important aspect of an organization’s culture. But it’s not difficult for them to have the opposite intended effect, by recognizing employees who don’t deserve it, failing to recognize those who do, or losing the sincerity of the recognition altogether — that is, going through […]
Data Warehouses and Disease Surveillance — What Can We Do Now?
So what do we do in the near term? Is there anything we can do, realistically, to better track the progress of diseases like Ebola, given our existing ecosystem of information systems in healthcare? As you can see from the list below, we could do better than nothing and the existing state of affairs, but any current […]
Disease Monitoring and Data Warehouses
We could easily justify a 30-page paper on this topic, but I don’t have time for that, so while it’s hot, I’m going to offer a few thoughts and observations on disease surveillance based upon my experience in the trenches of healthcare data. I hope that others with similar experiences will share your thoughts by submitting […]
What’s Happening in Healthcare Analytics?
As I travel around the country and chat with folks in our industry about analytics, I see topics of interest come and go in the data warehousing and analytics space. Below are the trends and topics that are hot right now, listed in no particular order, along with the questions that organizations are struggling to […]
Is It Time To Eliminate Meaningful Use?
The core premise in this blog is: Federal Meaningful Use (MU) requirements are well-intended, but like a teacher who “teaches to the test,” the program created a very complicated system that might pass the test of MU, but is not producing meaningful results for patients and clinicians. As reported in MedScape, the first formal study […]
What Does Actionable Data Actually Mean?
“Actionable data” is a term that has been tossed around for years, right? How many times have you heard this: “The key to analytics success is providing actionable data.” Okay, but what does that mean, really? Here I am, a data warehouse and analytics design guy… how can I measure whether the systems I design […]
An Uphill Climb: Applying Military Intelligence To Manage Data At Intermountain
[Below is the latest in a blog series in which Dale Sanders explores the “combination of fate, luck, planning and preparation that rolls together and creates a career.” Click to read Part 1 and Part 2] My search for the leading healthcare organizations in computer-aided decision-making that met the time-critical and life-critical requirements didn’t last very long. There […]