Blog
Nursing Informatics Series: Dawn’s Journey
When I was growing up, I wanted to become a veterinarian because I love animals. However, when I was twelve, my grandfather, who had a chronic health condition, came down with influenza A and passed away after only three days in the hospital. As my family sat with him, the nurses came in to monitor his condition frequently to make him comfortable. Their compassionate care to him was wonderful, but they didn’t just care for him.
Read MoreNursing Informatics Series: Olga’s Journey
I always knew I wanted to become a nurse. I wanted to save the world by helping others, and as a young adult, I thought helping others always meant being at the patient’s side.
Read MoreNursing Informatics Series: Robin’s Journey
Growing up, my role models were family friends who were registered nurses. They were compassionate and confident. I wanted to be like them. After graduating nursing school, I went to work in surgical ICU. Looking back now, I realize I have always relied on and have learned to trust technology even when it was electronic devices connected to my ICU patients.
Read MoreNursing Informatics Series: Zabrina’s Journey
I took an indirect path to nursing informatics. I started on my journey early—as a candy striper volunteer in a tertiary care center at the age of 13. This experience was my first contact with patients in a hospital setting.
Read MoreMy First HL7
HL7 Working Group Meetings (WGM) – #HL7WGM in my social media-oriented mind– are bustling, busy, eventful gatherings held three times a year that draw standards-minded people from around the world. I experienced my first HL7 WGM January in San Antonio, and from my short amount of time in the health IT (HIT) industry and little experience with standards in general, you could say I was overwhelmed but learned a ton.
Read MorePublic Health Analyst Series: Laura’s Journey
The me of ten years ago never would have predicted the career that I have now. Ten years ago, I was majoring in mathematics and economics at the University of California San Diego, on track to become a retirement actuary. I took a class on the US healthcare system to fulfill one of my general education requirements, and the professor assigned us a paper on a local healthcare organization of our choice.
Read MorePublic Health Analyst Series: Hector’s Journey
In the summer of 2001, I had one of those life-defining moments while interning at Harvard Medical School; I discovered the public health field. Up to that point, all I ever wanted to be was a family medicine physician with a dream of one day opening a private practice to help those in my community back in Peekskill, New York.
Read MorePublic Health Analysts: Who We Are and What We Do
Public health professionals generally have, at minimum, a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree from a program that includes a wide variety of concentrations such as epidemiology, biostatistics, health policy, hospital administration, and environmental health. People often associate public health with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but professionals with MPH degrees can…
Read MoreNursing Informatics Series: Marla’s Journey
Over the past 25 years, my nursing journey has taken me down different professional paths. At each crossroad in my career, I used the Servant Leadership philosophy as my compass to guide my journey. During my master’s program in nursing, I read Servant Leadership in Nursing by Mary Elizabeth O’Brien. I was finally able to put a…
Read MoreWellness in the Workplace – The Social Dimension
Previous Wellness in the Workplace blogs covered the physical dimension1 of wellness. Today’s blog covers the social dimension in a virtual environment. Social wellness refers to cultivating relationships and connecting with others. In a distributed company like Lantana, this can be challenging since we are physically separated from our coworkers. As the map shows, our staff are…
Read MoreTransitioning from CDA to FHIR
FHIR, HL7’s latest standard, supports the document paradigm without document restrictions. FHIR includes a RESTful API out of the box, as well as alternate syntaxes (i.e., XML and JSON). The industry will need transition strategies for those invested heavily in CDA while new implementers move directly to FHIR.
Read MoreAnnual Retreat 2018
Fifteen minutes into the 2017 film Wonder Woman, my only thought was, “I want to work with them!”—the fictional Amazon warriors of Themyscira. While I haven’t ended up performing heavy sword work and archery, I believe I’ve come across the next best thing: Lantana. Like the Amazons, my telework colleagues are brilliant and ready to…
Read MoreReduce Provider Burden by Rethinking the eCQM Development Process
I’ve looked at the feds, I’ve looked at the vendors,I’ve tried to find the keyto 50 million burdens. (with apologies to The Who) The electronic health record promised a transformation in the quality and accessibility of health information. It also promised relief from tedious paper-based documentation chores. The results, so far, are sobering. The transformative benefits…
Read MoreNursing Informatics Series: Angela’s Journey
As a former home health nurse, I know firsthand the importance of real-time patient health information. Today’s nurses can easily document and upload information that is instantaneously accessible to other health team members. But it wasn’t always so. When I was starting out, documenting an initial assessment and care plan for a new home health…
Read MoreNursing Informatics Series: Lynn’s Journey
Today, as a Senior Nurse Informaticist at Lantana, I am part of a team of clinical, program and policy analysts, working with IT engineers to develop standards-based solutions permitting interoperable—platform independent—exchange of health information. Twenty-five years ago, I was a young nurse starting out—just look at me here at my “capping and pinning” ceremony! Here…
Read MoreWorking from Home (#WFH): How working remotely is one millennial’s dream job
Working from home, once an unimaginable idea, is a regular part of many professionals’ lives. Technology innovation and improvements enable many to work from their houses, apartments, and even RVs. The Millennial generation, having grown up with computers nearby and cell phones in hand, want to hop aboard the WFH train. Statistics show “68% of…
Read MoreHas the Clock Run Out on Electronic Claims Attachments?
With the shift towards value-based care, payers still need access to clinical information for reimbursement decisions as well as for cost and quality metrics and standardizing enough of the clinical record to satisfy the anticipated attachments reg would be an excellent next step in that direction.
Read MoreNursing informaticists: who we are and what we do
All around the world, May 12 is celebrated as International Nurses Day. It marks the end, in the U.S., of National Nurses Week—a time to honor and recognize nurses for their contribution to health care. May 12 is also the birthday of Florence Nightingale, the nineteenth-century English nurse who became legendary for her work…
Read MorePleasant surprise with open-source development
This is a story of how a health IT guy goes looking for an easier way of doing a tedious task, can’t find that easier way anywhere, ends up building it himself, saves a lot of time, and gets a happy lesson in the value of shared, open-source software. In my position as a software…
Read MoreExtreme Vacation
Lantana provides a unique benefit to its employees: after seven years of employment, an employee can take a two-month paid vacation—the “sabbatical.” I’ve now been working for the company for over seven years (over eight if you include my contracting time), and I recently finished my sabbatical, and it was amazing! Here are my…
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