Welcome to my blog
Introductions are always best first. My name is Robert Reed and I've worked IT in a college health setting for almost 20 years. When I started, Health IT didn't exist in my facility. The IT department was no different from any IT department anywhere. We helped users figure out why they couldn't print, how to do things on their computers (at the time Power Macs running Mac OS 9!) and all the usual issues plus we deployed the computers.
Health IT in our health center began with a solution. One of my colleagues at the time was sitting in a meeting and overheard two clinical staff members speculating on how hard it was to take a phone message from a patient and then track that message to it's resolution. This was probably 1998. My colleague built a system based on FileMaker Pro that was served out on a simple web server (using LASSO) to allow the nurse to take the message and when they clicked submit, an outguide was printed in Medical Records. The outguide was two part: the first part was used as a place holder in the chart stack and the second had the text of the message and was clipped to the chart when it was delivered to the clinic. The appropriate research was done and then the response to the patient was recorded. The chart could then be returned to the medical record department. After the patient was successfully contacted, the system alerted Medical Records so that the chart could be returned to the clinic and the loop closed.
When we began to support the actual mission of the clinic and not just the computers and IT infrastrucure we officially became Health IT and not just IT. Other home grown solutions followed, such as a secure message system that we wrote with PERL, mySQL and hosted on FreeBSD servers with Apache. This worked in the same manner all secure message systems work today (ie you create the message in the system, the recipient is notified via email that a message is waiting and then they log in to view it).
At about this time I began to focus on a different set of learning objectives than my campus IT peers. I learned about HIPAA (our campus health center is a HIPAA covered entitiy along with navigating the FERPA landscape), as well as other policies as they came up: Meaningful Use, ICD-10 Conversion, HITECH act, officially certified EHR systems (back when CCHIT was the only game in town) and others.
So that is who I am. I wish to use this blog to share what we are doing and hopefully somebody will read and find my thoughts useful. Hopefully others will read and offer suggestions. I'm also keen to hear what kinds of topics might be addressed in a blog such as this.
If you are going to attend ACHA this spring, I would be happy to make your acquaintance. I will be co-presenting a topic on navigating the HIPAA vs FERPA landscape.
