Digital Pharmacist Digest - ✍️ opening EHR notes to patients, clinical performance feedback for quality improvement, and more

Hiya 👋

Welcome to another edition of the digital pharmacist digest!

Do you prefer to work in silence or have background music on when focusing on a task? These are other small factors are what I experiment with to get into the flow state - being fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. Personally, the time of day and workplace environment are key factors so I divvy up my time to promote getting into a flow state for deep focused activities. It does help to work be working on the exciting area of progressing digital health.

Thanks for reading,
Kevin

📖What I'm reading

🩺💻 Health informatics - Why Reading Your Doctor’s Notes Can Be Painful

Insightful commentary on how the art of writing medical notes needs to change when they are made available to patients, also touching on EHR note bloat due to copy and paste.
"What’s to be done to make the open notes more valuable for you and us? Doctors need to continue to adjust to the new reality. To do that as best we can, we are going to have to embrace one crucial principle: Words matter . We are going to have to come to terms with bloat, ruthlessly prioritizing what we write. Our notes will have to be plainer, with less shorthand. They are going to have to be more neutral, and respectful, even empathetic, toward our patients. Knowing patients are reading our notes can only help us reflect on and overcome our own implicit biases."

📈 Patient Safety - You can lead clinicians to water, but you can’t make them drink: the role of tailoring in clinical performance feedback to improve care quality

Tailoring clinical performance feedback (CPF) for quality improvement engages clinicians more to ultimately drive further quality improvement. I particularly like the heading “The impact of organisational and professional culture: culture will eat strategy for breakfast”.
“Individuals and teams working to design and implement CPF interventions to improve patient outcomes should focus more purposefully on tailoring. CPF can be positioned as the type of strategy clinicians want and need to engage with by understanding who they are and what they believe and tailoring strategies to those insights.”

💭 Work life & Productivity - Six Thinking Hats: use parallel thinking to tackle tough decisions

A great framework to use in a team or even by yourself to deeply think about a problem from different perspectives: information, emotions and instinct, risks, benefits, and creativity.

👨‍💻 Product management - Master Class with Marty Cagan

Marty is a product management guru. This talk distils his thoughts on product management, agility and coaching, and why it is not simply a "feature factory".