E-mail not displaying correctly? Click here to view it in your browser.
We hope you are enjoying this publication. If you have received it in error, you may unsubscribe at the bottom.

Dr. Pat Recommends

Select Doses of Sanity: 2 CD Audio Set

Want some fresh ideas on how to repair your enthusiasm for medical caregiving?

No time or energy to read?

Here’s the audio CD set you’ve been waiting for! This is easy! Just pop it in a CD player and laugh as you learn!

Use the code SANITY at checkout and receive 20% off.

Our Customer Service Department is always available to take your order 1-888-437-7286.  Be sure to check out other items on our website www.positivelyhealthygifts.com.


Attention Meeting Planners!

Dr. Pat Raymond delivers high-content, interactive programs that are lots of fun. She even gives away great door prizes! Most importantly, she will make you look good!

Call 1-888-437-7286 or write to plraymond@rxforsanity.com or visit www.rxforsanity.com for details on her programs!

Hire Dr. Pat!!

Save $$ by double-booking Dr. Pat

Want to bring Dr. Pat to your hospital or healthcare organization?

If Dr. Pat is already coming to a town or city near you, "piggy back" your presentation to save travel expenses. E-mail us at plraymond@rxforsanity.com to learn how!

NC HR Directors
Asheville NC
Sept 8, 2010

Broadcast Conference
Denver CO
Sept 23-26, 2010

SGNA
Elmira NY
Oct 16, 2010

HMIS Staff Programming/Retreat
Youngstown, Ohio
Oct 28-29, 2010

Back To Basics GI Course
Virginia Beach VA
Nov 6, 2010

Advocate Health System
Chicago, IL
Nov 13, 2010

Diabetes Educators
Smithfield, VA
Nov 17, 2010

KMCPA
Topeka, KS
Dec 10, 2010

NSA Winter Conference
Atlanta
Feb. 18-20, 2011

SGNA
Temecula, CA
March 11-12, 2011

SGNA 38th Annual Course
Indianapolis, IN
May 6-11, 2011

SGNA
San Diego, CA
Oct 15, 2011


Meddler's Mock Medical Music:

Dr. Pat's tweaking a new Butt Meddler tune, and could use your help. Any tweaks that you have that could make our take on CCR's "Lookin' Out My Backdoor" would we appreciated! Email them to Dr. Pat at PLRaymond@RxForSanity.com!

Just got home from pharmacy, drank down my GoLytely
Got to sit down, take a rest on the commode
The colon prep it kicks in, pretty soon I'm poopin'
Doo, doo, doo, poopin’ out my back door

Now that I’m turnin’ 50, need colonoscopy
To look for all the happy polyps dancing in my bowels
Polyps turn into cancer, colon scopes the answer
Doo, doo, doo, lookin' up my back door

Gastroenterologists want to frolic in my bowels
“Won't you take a ride on my flyin' scope?”
Wond'rous apparitions from narcotic medications
Doo, doo, doo, scopin' up my back door

The nurse and the doctor are playing in my bowels
I’m takin’ a ride on the flyin' scope!
Drugs pack quite a wallop, soon I’ll have no polyps
Doo, doo, doo, lookin' up my back door

Fartin’ troubles? Make a noise! Release that back door, oh boy
Listen to that happy flatus dancing round the room.

{Slowly}
Repeat colon in five years, today I have no more fears
Doo, doo, doo, lookin' up my back door

Piece of Flair:

Flair for you and Flair to share on your Facebook








Rants & Raves:

Thank you, Patricia!  Have enjoyed you for many years!  Now entering my 25th year in a VA GI unit.  Before that, I did scopes in the OR in a small community hospital.  Boy, I've seen some changes!  Your humor matches mine.  God bless.
 
Linda Amick BSN, CGRN

Got something you want to "rant or rave" about?


Send an e-mail to plraymond@rxforsanity.com to tell us about it!

Dose of Laughter

Click here to watch a funny clip of Lou Rawls and Damon Wayan

You can't keep this info to yourself! That would be selfish. Click "Send to a Friend" RIGHT NOW!
You are welcome to forward this to nice people everywhere
Share it with a friend.

A Note from Dr. Pat

Picture of note pad

Recently, someone tweeted about colonoscopies; was there a card to send your friend or loved one after theirs? Would that be congrats or sympathy, I wondered. I launched on a search of the internet, occasionally wincing at not such clever potty humor, and found a few that might lend a chuckle to your recently plumbed friend.
 
Check them out here:
http://www.rxforsanity.com/colonoscopy-cards
 
So what about you? Got any clever colon quips? We're running a contest through fall 2011, looking for fresh colonoscopy humor for our next colonoscopy humor compilation: "Colonoscopy: It's Not a Party Until Somebody Loses Their Pants!" Winners (and there are as many as there are fresh jokes) get their entry in the next book, get a copy of that new book, AS WELL AS copies of both the earlier ones! All this for being clever. To enter or check it out, go here:  http://www.colonjoke.net/giveaway.htm
 
If this ezine helped you, please forward it to 4-5 of your medical colleagues!

- Pat Raymond, M.D.
Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

Your Dose of Sanity

No Neo-Luddites in Endoscopy: Embrace and Interface
Patricia L Raymond MD FACP FACG

EMR. There is no halfway with this modern medical tool. No big toe dipping, just a taste, a smidge or skosh. Like bathing your private parts in an icy pond while camping, EMR requires that you jump in with both feet.
 
Of course, you might claim to be a Neo-Luddite. If you are unfamiliar with the term, the Luddites in England of the early nineteenth century disapproved of the industrial revolution, and wrecked factories by industrial sabotage to protest the replacement of their skilled labor jobs by machinery. Their attempted social de-evolution led Luddites to execution or transportation to Australia. Many today, wishing for return to a quieter, calmer, slower existence, believe that the Luddites may have been on to something.
 
If you lean toward the neo-Luddite, you might elect to avoid EMR like the plague (In fact, you won’t find much dispute in medicine that the plague is in fact a good thing to avoid, so perhaps the analogy is not a great one).  We all know people who don’t have an email address (gasp!), which in our era is like not being sure how to use a telephone or play a CD (Although come to think of it, this analogy may have holes as well.  I’m not always certain how to use the multifunctional “Swiss-Army-Knifish” cell phone that I own… really, why would I wish to shoot home movies on my phone, or read books on that itsy bitsy screen.  It’s just not natural. And daily,  I accidentally shut the phone off while speaking the brush of an earring…oftentimes several times per conversation if I’m particularly bejeweled in a particularly stylish pair.). Oh my gosh, perhaps I’m a neo-Luddite too!
 
My brother Robert is what I call a selective Luddite. Although he works as a high level computer programmer for a multinational corporation, he carries a pocket watch, and doesn’t even own a cell phone. He is confused by conversations about whether he can join your ‘circle’, as he limits his television viewing as well. Given the frequent interruptions of my life by my own personal torment device AKA cell phone, I can see his valid Ludditian point.
 
Regardless of my status as a neo-Luddite wannabe, I am an EMR cheerleader. I designed my own one person practice to be enhanced by use of new EMR technology- a technology which allows the practice to more easily serve our patients, rather than buffer them away. In an office setting, when a patient calls, we all may have has access to their chart at the touch of a/several buttons. Immediate, real time care can be given, rather than the ‘take a message and someone may call you back …eventually’. In addition to better customer service and better patient care, our practice costs a lot less- less transcription, less chart pulling by staff, and less postage as most correspondence is sent out by fax. Referring physicians like our faxed reports as their speed in getting results whilst a patient waits in their office is near-instantaneous…and they need only request records in the rare instance that records are not faxed out on the very day that the patient is seen.
 
Beyond the office management and customer service logistics, we enjoy lifestyle logistics.  I can check my lab results and write notes where I am right now, sitting on my back porch with a wireless connection. My staff can sign on from home to provide clinical support. My nurse Deb oftentimes takes patient information sheets home to do data entry in the evening or late at night for our direct access colonoscopy patients; she can access the office via secured server and a virtual desktop. I myself have kept in touch from the Incan temples of Peru to my rural lakeside retreat. My EMR buys my staff time and flexibility.
 
My freedom, in a bundle that weighs less than five pounds.
 
But what about endoscopy? Is the power of EMR being harnessed wisely in your suite? Perhaps not.
 
From the doctor point of view in your unit, EMR is groovy. We use software like EndoSoft, allowing us to quickly generate a report with full color photos based on our own personalized templates, and then send that report by fax to our referring docs and hand a spare copy to patients. Quick gratification. Great customer service. Exclude the middleman/woman of medical records and transcription. What’s not to love? Oh, and our hospital loves our endoEMR too, estimating that we might be saving as much as $100,000 per year in transcription costs (of course, the system costs money, but once it’s up and running, the payback period is relatively short).
 
But then I look at my circulating nurses work station and roll my eyes. IMHO, endoscopy nurses and EMR have not properly interfaced. Anna’s cart features a computer screen and keyboard for the surgical scheduling computer, another computer screen for the hospital system (to enter pathology history data), and yet another screen of sorts for the monitor, the vital signs displayed then entered manually into papers wedged on the remaining sliver of space remaining on top of the desk. Yesh.  Adding another non interfacing computer does not constitute a useful patient care tool; the problem in our suite seems to be a commitment by the Hospital Information Systems (HIS) folks on making the interface of these multiple machines work. Just looking at the multiple systems, I’m tingling with an industrial sabotage Luddite-ish urge.
 
My question: Do your nurses, particularly the specialty nurses like those in GI, have a seat at your hospital’s HIS conference table when new technology is chosen and implemented? I cannot imagine it is so, with the lack of coherence I see on that cart across the stretcher from me each day.
 
What to do? Have your endoscopy unit manager contact HIS and hospital administration, and make sure that interested and tech savvy nurses are appointed to purchase and implementation committees for new software installations at your hospital or endoscopy center. Or appoint a techno savvy endo nurse to interface with HIS geeks to work on the endo system you already have, until a smooth and seamless interface between the multiple monitors is realized.
 
EMR holds a great deal of promise in medicine. The promise to allow us more quality time with our patients, less redundant labor, better communication.  But only you can dare to embrace, and interface with, your technology. It’s either that or face transportation as a Luddite.
 
Pseudo-Technogeek Dr. Patricia Raymond FACG (www.RxForSanity.com & www.YourHealthChoice.net)  is good at turning on computers, and even better at calling computer customer service departments and insisting on one syllable answers.
 
First carefully select the technology that will enhance your life and work, and then find that proverbial teen to teach you to use it.
 

Like this article?

Find more by keeping up with Dr. Pat on Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

- - - - - - - - -