Author: CT Lin

CMIO, UCHealth (Colorado); Professor, University of Colorado School of Medicine

Open Notes: a 16 year journey

Upcoming press release:

UCHealth is excited to be the first in the state of Colorado to offer Open Notes to all 1.5 million patients in our system (as of May 2016). Open notes are now available across the spectrum of care, including outpatient clinics and emergency department notes to hospital discharge summaries. We believe that information transparency is crucial; an informed and engaged patient is a healthier patient.

Or, in Haiku form:
Not sure what Doc said?
Why hide medical advice?
Open Notes are here.

Medicine in the age of Facebook #iHT2

My talk at the Institute for Healthcare Technology Transformation today, as covered by Mark Hagland of Healthcare Informatics journal:

Article at:

http://www.healthcare-informatics.com/article/patient-engagement/it-s-transparency-get-over-it-ct-lin-md-challenges-iht2-denver-audience

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Hell’s Angels (book review)

hells_buyer1Well, I’m not sure what to think. I read this because of my book club, where we read Juan Thompson’s book “Stories I tell Myself”. He’s Hunter’s son, and writes well in his own right (and, works in Healthcare IT in Denver!). Moreover, this was an opportunity for me to read some literature of the Gonzo generation that I never got around to. Juan mentioned the lyricism of Hunter’s description of being on motorcycle barreling down Pacific Coast Highway at midnight. This prompted me to pull Hell’s Angels off my wife’s bookshelf, and then I was hooked.

Diving into the book, Hunter takes you inside the California Hell’s Angels, the (intentionally) bad press, why they smell bad, how “looking for a fight” gave them a raison d’etre, and perplexingly, how news coverage elevated them to a national phenomenon, when otherwise, they might have faded away. Its a love song about the dispossessed, beautifully reported and written.

It’s far from my personal experience, and an opportunity to walk a mile in shoes I would never otherwise wear.

CMIO’s take? There are leadership lessons everywhere you look: from brilliant police captains who narrowly avoid pitched battles using mundane traffic cones and enforced curfews, to Hell’s Angels chapter leaders using nimble telephone trees to assemble a flash-mob, before there was such a thing as a flash-mob.

Surround yourself with people smarter than you

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Lots of lego people

I’m grateful to work with lots of smart people. One of them is Zuzanna Czernik, who is first author on a paper recently published in JAMA. She notes the current despair about how Electronic Health Records (EHRs) take us away from the bedside of the patient. Her surprising investigation reveals that research studies, over the past 60 years, consistently state “residents spend surprisingly little time at the bedside.” I enjoyed co-authoring paper, and helping to find  a light at the end of this tunnel.

Time at the Bedside (Computing)
JAMA. 2016;315(22):2399-2400. doi:10.1001/jama.2016.1722
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2528216

Link to my ResearchGate publications (including full text of this article)…
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/CT_Lin

Launching a blog

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View from near the top of Flatirons 1 and 2 hike, Boulder, CO with my kids and parents.

Hello world! Inspired by others (Tosha Kowalski, John Halamka, my famous sister Michelle Lin), I’m taking my first stab at a public blog with musings about Electronic Health Records, Patient Portals, information transparency, life as a CMIO, organizational change, psychology of individuals and organizations, communications strategies, science fiction, little black books, saving the planet, and anything else I find cool or interesting. Navel-gazing in short. I promise to keep it short. Hope you drop in from time to time. CT Lin MD