Matthew's Blog
Physician Mission Statements: Your Employers or Your Own?
Here are some lovely parts of various purpose, principles, value, vision, and mission statements from several large healthcare organizations: Improving customers' lives by making healthcare work better.Our customers are at the center of all we do.Act with Urgency.Be...
The Definition of Innovation: Mine or MIT’s?
If you pursue a Certificate of Strategy and Innovation at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, one of the first questions you will be asked is what is your definition of innovation. My answer was “Creativity Engineering.” I liked the Venn diagram-like overlap of the...
The One Question to Determine if Your Organization’s EHR Mining is Ethical
EHRs are superior to paper charts in two ways. First—because their content is digital—their contents are more easily mined, analyzed, and shared. And second? EHRs offer the ability to communicate directly to the patient, allowing the physician (or the organization's...
What I Use as a Practical Definition of “Disease”
Having a working, practical definition of what a disease is can help when trying to decide whether this-or-that thing is a disease, or when using the term “disease” in communication. The definition I use for the term disease is criteria-based. The criteria I use are:...
Self-assessment and the Dunning-Kruger Effect
Here’s the Dunning-Kruger effect in a nutshell: Incompetent individuals lack the metacognitive skills that enable them to tell how poorly they are performing, and as a result, they come to hold inflated views of their performance and ability.Justin Kruger and David...
Reading with Highlighters
I appreciate the benefits of engaging with all information on a screen including verbal content, or the visual information contained in figures and tables. However, if I am seeking a deep understanding of some subject matter, nothing is better for me than printing out...
Considering How I Read to Help Inform How I Write
I typically “read” in one of four ways. Physical Books. This is my favorite tool for what I call deep reading—a reading which requires intense thought, and where note creation and highlighting are trivial. I like to physically engage with the books, including...
A Flaw in NLP-Enabled EHRs?
One idea I run across frequently when hearing about natural language processing (NLP) and the electronic health record (EHR) is how real-time transcription of the conversations between patient and physician will free up the physician’s time so she can “concentrate on...
“ΨMorality”, And Why Corporations Are Like The Gods
Let’s talk about gods, corporations, and morality. Do you remember back in junior high reading the Iliad, where, in Book I, Apollo unleashed the plague on the Achaeans in response to the disrespect shown to his priest Chryses by Agamemnon: Thus did he pray, and Apollo...