Building Unity Farm Sanctuary - Second Week of January 2017
As temperatures fall and the snow accumulates, work on the Sanctuary gets harder. It ’s -1 degrees F (without wind chill) today and that makes bare handed fine motor movements difficult. In the early weeks of building the sanctuary, we ’re focused on infrastructure - fencing, heating, plumbing, electrical, and building maintenance.For the fences, we ’ve replaced rotten fence posts and cross pieces. We ’ve replaced the electric fence, rewired the electrical supply to paddocks, and added additional gate hardware to keep the horses and goats inside the fences. Napoleon, our pygmy goat,...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - January 5, 2017 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Our 2017 Priorities
In early 2016, I wrote about the 5 pillars of the BIDMC 2016 work plan - social networking, mobile, analytics, cloud, and keeping data private (SMACK)As we begin 2017, what should be the focus of our work over the next year?1. Embrace Social Networking concepts in our workflow, including the EHRRegardless of the policies, repeals, and delays of the Trump administration, we ’ll still need to optimize usability and support the four goals of value-based purchasing - quality measurement, total medical expense management, practice process improvement and technology adoption. BIDMC has already created a prototype of grou...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - January 4, 2017 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Building Unity Farm Sanctuary - Fifth Week of December 2016
The holidays are a time of joy and family gathering, bringing together multiple generations at Unity Farm. This year we introduced all our visitors to the sanctuary. My mother was eager to help out with the horses, pigs, and goats. Here are a few photos of her greeting, feeding, and generally being a part of the daily rituals at the farm and sanctuary.Much of work over the holidays involved preparing for our upcoming new arrivals. Amber, the 20 year old Arabian horse, arrives on Monday January 2. We had to rebuild the main horse paddock and electric fence at Unity Farm Sanctuary, replacing rott...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 29, 2016 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
2016 in Review
Many people are yearning for the end of 2016 - too many unexpected deaths of notable people, too many unexpected acts of violence, too many unexpected election results.However, 2016 did have its highlights. In early 2016, I wrote about thefive pillars of the BIDMC strategic plan for the year - social media-like documentation, mobile technologies for patients/providers, analytics for care management, cloud hosted interoperability and and enhanced security. Here ’s my top 10 list from 2016 as to how these concepts actually played out.1. In early 2016, a guiding coalition of developers and provider...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 28, 2016 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Building Unity Farm Sanctuary - Fourth Week of December 2016
As the end of the year approaches, I ’m reflecting on the changes that 2016 has brought. Unity Farm Sanctuary was a distant strategy for leaving a legacy at the end of our lives. Now it is a reality with a population of wonderful creatures who will be able enjoy their days in the pastures, forests, and gardens of a safe, vegan, organic space surrounded by permanently protected rural trust land.The current capacity of the sanctuary is a 5 stall barn, a two adult horse run in, and a pony/donkey/goat run in. Our theoretical maximum capacity is 4 adult horses, 3 ponies, 3 donkeys, and 3 goats.Next ...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 22, 2016 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
The Most Important Interoperability Story of 2016
You may have missed or not understood the implications ofthis press release. Here ' s a guest post from Micky Tripathi, the CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative that explains everything you need to know:" This summary provides some additional information on the recently announced interoperability agreement between CommonWell and The Sequoia Project (Carequality). For full disclosure, I am on the Board of Directors of The Sequoia Project, a contractor to CommonWell, and participated in the discussions leading to the agreement. The description below does not necessarily reflect the views of either ...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 21, 2016 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Unity Farm Sanctuary Begins
Today we completed the purchase of the Unity Farm Sanctuary, established Unity Farm Sanctuary Inc. (a non-profit charity) and opened for animal rescue. Our first new citizens arrived on our first day.Pippin is a 30 year Welsh Pony who is healthy, friendly, and outgoing. He has Cushing ’s disease so he needs daily Pergolide mesylate, a dopamine agonist. It works by taking over regulation of the pituitary gland, helping to decrease ACTH release and lower blood cortisol levels. Although Cushing ' s can ' t be cured, administration of this medication can help control symptoms, and possibly slow the prog...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 15, 2016 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Dispatch from Israel
This week Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker led a trip of clinicians, industry leaders, government officials, academics, and entrepreneurs to visit Israel (not at taxpayer expense) on a mission to establish Massachusetts as an incubator for the US growth of Israeli companies. I represented the healthcare IT innovation work we ’re doing at Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical School.Israel is a remarkable place. With 8 million people in a nation the size of New Jersey situated in an unstable part of the world, Israel has no choice but to be a start up nation, creating companies that generate economic im...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 14, 2016 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Unity Farm Journal - Second Week of December 2016
Every night, Kathy and I sit by the fire and debrief on the events of the day. What rescue animals did we take on? What new projects need to be started? Is there new infrastructure required? Were their notable events at Unity Farm and Unity Farm Sanctuary? On our to do list, have we addressed the needs of all living things?This week we agreed to take on 3 goats - Charlie (black alpine), Billy (white alpine) and Napoli (black pygmy cross), three wethered (gelded) males. We do not have a lot of history on them, (not even their ages) since they came from an unfortunate situation where they weren ' t ...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 8, 2016 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
21st Century Cures and the Road Ahead
I ’ve been writing fewer posts recently because the trajectory forward for healthcare and healthcare IT seems to be evolving very rapidly. In just the past week, we ’ve had*TheAmerican Hospital Association letter suggesting that 21,000 pages of regulations be rolled back including Meaningful Use Stage Three concepts and quality measurement in many care settings.*The passage of the21st Century Cures bill and its many IT related mandates*The nomination ofTom Price for HHS Secretary andSeema Verma for CMS administratorAs I ’ve written about previously, I believe that value-based purchasing and the move ...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 7, 2016 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Unity Farm Journal - First Week of December 2016
As winter approaches each year, we work hard to prepare the farm property for the cold, dark, snowy days ahead. Weekends and nights are spent clearing brush, /storing all irrigation infrastructure, and doing the last digging/hauling/siftng before soil freezes solid. At this point the barnyard, trails and the sanctuary next door are ready. All farm equipment is freshly oiled and filled with winter-ready fluids. We purchased a snow blade attachment for the Terex front loader since we ’re responsible for snow removal on our 1/2 mile of local roads. The Terex snow blower attachment...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 1, 2016 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
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As winter approaches each year, we work hard to prepare the farm property for the cold, dark, snowy days ahead. Weekends and nights are spent clearing brush, /storing all irrigation infrastructure, and doing the last digging/hauling/siftng before soil freezes solid. At this point the barnyard, trails and the sanctuary next door are ready. All farm equipment is freshly oiled and filled with winter-ready fluids. We purchased a snow blade attachment for the Terex front loader since we ’re responsible for snow removal on our 1/2 mile of local roads. The Terex snow blower attachment...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - December 1, 2016 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Unity Farm Journal - Fourth Week of November 2016
Happy Thanksgiving from Unity Farm!A new pig has joined the herd - Lunchbox. He ’s 3 years old and has a remarkable personality. He loves humans and is very good with children. We ’re gradually introducing him to Hazel and Tofu through a livestock fence. In a week or so, we ’ll bring them together snout to snout once they have had the opportunity to learn each other’s smells and temperament. Creating harmony in a pig herd is an art form and there ’s agreat deal of literature about it. We ’re seeing the expected behaviors - grunting/chewing, side stepping, and a ...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - November 24, 2016 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
The BIDMC CareKit app
The following is a guest blog post from Seth Berkowitz, MD, who authors many of the innovative apps in the BIDMC Crowdsourcing program:Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, has developed BIDMC@home, a new app for engaging patients using Apple ’s CareKit and ResearchKit frameworks and the HealthKit API. The app provides a flexible framework to help patients manage their health from home, as directed by their physicians. The app will be piloted in several specific patient populations and will eventually be offered to BIDMC’s entire net work of over 250,000 patients.BIDMC@hom...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - November 23, 2016 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
Unity Farm Journal - Third Week of November 2016
This week we had the Supermoon -the largest/brightest moon since 1948 The pigs enjoyed basking in the moonlight while rooting and hunting for grubs/worms. Here ’s a picture of hazel in the moonlightPigs are hedonists and there are three things that make them happy1. Food2. Warmth3. Belly rubsHere are a few picturesTofu enjoying a fall sugar pumpkinHazel stealing a piece of Tofu ’s pumpkinHazel in the winter pig palace warming her posterior in the mid morning sunA television film crew dropped by the farm this week to get closeups of the alpaca. Here ’s what it looked like. The alpaca are demandin...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - November 17, 2016 Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs
