Seth Godin, copyrighted image from his site
Seth Godin is not a health care professional. But he is a smart guy who knows a lot about human nature and about process — what works and what doesn’t work for real people. His solutions to problems aren’t high tech and shiny. They are low tech, high touch, and effective.
So when the title of his post from yesterday, The simple form that could save your life, caught my eye, I took a closer look. And it surprised me to see what could reasonably be described as “a patient’s report sheet” or “a patient’s brain.” Not, of course, for the patient to use at shift change but to be used at ‘caretaker change’ when he or she sees a new doctor or nurse practitioner and is supposed to regurgitate a full health history on demand.
Seth’s idea isn’t particularly original. My Dad certainly crafted a pair of Word docs something like this, for my Mom and him, a few years before he died.
But, in traditional Seth fashion, Godin a) sought professional help on the contents and b) is ‘going big’ on the distribution
Seth’s motto seems to be “if I think it is useful then everyone should have a copy.”
Take a look. You may want to download the doc and help a parent or friend fill it out. Or you might want to suggest the link to a patient who is embarking on one of those long voyages through the healthcare system where having the right info at the right time might just make a bit of a difference.
Here’s the link in clear text, so it is easy to copy and put in an email:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/02/the-simple-form-that-could-save-your-life.html
I’ve been talking to my friend Nurse Denise about how to keep our popular Nursing Brains page up-to-date and relevant. It gets a lot of traffic and I want to be sure that we continue to give value with the discussion and links that are there.
One of my questions was pretty basic but hit a nerve: Why, in this age of Electronic Medical Records, do nurses still need paper report sheets? Shouldn’t they be going the way of . . . land-line phones or big cathode-ray TV sets?
She immediately answered that the EMR simply doesn’t give a nurse the big picture view of the patient’s status that she needs. Read more…
Lewis Dot Diagram for water
If you are visiting this site, chances are you are already a nurse and your days of struggling through chemistry classes are behind you. But, if you know someone who is currently a chem student — or even a chem instructor, please consider referring him or her to our new sister site: Learning Laboratory.
We’re trying to understand more about college-level science instruction — what’s available in the way of online tools and where there might be some product opportunities for us.
As we research specific topics and try to identify the best tools available, we intend to publish curated lists of online resources. For example, we’ve just posted an article on tools available to help teach and learn about Lewis Dot Structures.
I experienced a tidy patch of synchronicity recently.
First, I worked my way through the Crisis Management chapter in the Quantum Leadership book I’m reading. Second, I went to see Moneyball, the new Brad Pitt movie about baseball.
Quantum’s take on crisis management is, essentially, “Get used to it. Get better at it. Stop thinking of it as something you only do from time to time.” The authors point out that health care organizations have long done effective planning for all sorts of crises: natural disasters, epidemics, and the like. But they haven’t been so proactive about slower moving crises generated by changes in their business ecosystem. Such game-changers can be technical, regulatory, or financial; they share the characteristics of being unplanned and unpredictable but are hardly unexpected.
Read more…
Anyone who owns an iOS phone knows it; they have an iPhone, an iPad, or an iPod Touch. Apple is great at branding and great at capturing mindshare for their handheld devices.
Anyone who owns a Blackberry knows it; they have a Blackberry Torch, Curve, Bold, etc. Research In Motion has also done a great job of branding for their handsets and the Blackberry secure communications infrastructure that stands behind them.
But it’s different if you have an Android phone. Read more…