Back in the (Blogging) Saddle

After a week and a half of intensity at work and intensity at home I'm about to get back in the saddle again. If you have for some reason followed my twitter posts recently they are mostly about bread and chicken coops. The work-life balance tipped away from work for a while and it's been nice. I find that once I refuel like this my mind starts looking up and around again vs the heads down daily grind that can come after intense periods of work.

Work has been intense. Strategy development, team building, infrastructure projects and new technology evaluations abound. I like to get deep into a topic, obsess about it and know as much as I can in the time I have. I then come back up for air and a reality check and figuring out how much of each is needed to keep the momentum going requires more art than science right now.

So a colleague of mine gave me a few articles to read recently and I took the opportunity in a longish large meeting to scan them and it spawned a few ideas.

• An article on the effect of compensation on collaboration (negative in most cases) got cross pollinated with what I'm learning about the National Quality Forum's likely future direction on hospital metrics.
• Build vs buy on the Business Intelligence front in payor organizations. What are the lesson's learned for providers and how does that relate to emerging trends on data aggregation vendors as opposed to traditional Business Intelligence vendors.
• The economic recovery legislation and it's impact on adoption of EMRs and even more importantly the execution of those projects.

Today was a good reminder to stop, pay attention to everything going on around me and not just focus on the next steps and the plan. If you don't stop and smell the roses then you might just miss something important...

Blogs In Review

Being a Google blogger user I've been able to pretty easily integrate a few of my other Google tools with it and am rather fond of the result. On the right hand side of my blog you'll note a blogroll and newsreel. These are both imported automagically from my Google reader account that slurps up my favorite blog's articles. Articles that I flag with a star are automatically posted to the newsreel. I also like emailing some of the articles that are especially interesting to folks that I suspect will enjoy them. Here's a few of the characters that I follow these days...

Fred Trotter - I like to think as Fred as the Healthcare IT/FOSS curmudgeon of the group. Given the fact that my favorite comedian is Lewis Black this is definitely a compliment. He posts on lots of topics having to due with free and open source software (FOSS) as an enabler for Healthcare IT at reasonable cost.

Life as a Healthcare CIO - John Halamka's blog. He's sort of a celebrity healthcare CIO with tons of creds and experience. Some of the most interesting things that he blogs about come from his work as the Chair for HITSP (Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel) whose work has the potential to improve integration of HIT systems across the industry. His penchant for dressing in all black reminds me of Neil Diamond for some reason.

Candid CIO - This is the blog of Will Weider who is CIO for a rather large health system. I enjoy his insights on customer service and change management the most.

Not all of my Google reader subscriptions are listed on my blogroll. There are several others as well from places like TechRepublic and even Scientific American, either science and tech research or general industry mags. It's a pretty easy mechanism to catch mostly the news that I want and post it easily to Blueberrytech. Take a gander at the others out there and see what you think...

Unexpected Benefits of Blogging

I've discovered a few unexpected benefits of blogging about my worklife that I thought I'd share...

• It reinforces my optimism. I blog to write and as my college writing teach said, "writing is an inherently public and creative act". I can brood if left to my own thoughts alone but the creative process doesn't allow for brooding much and the public act of writing doesn't allow me to feel alone much.
• It allows me to collect, synthesize and assemble thoughts that would otherwise remain unrelated. I'm rarely able to sit down and tackle a single topic when writing a new post. Several things swim around in my head at the same time. This may be because I scan my google reader account (see the newsreel box on the right) usually before blogging. The thoughts of a lot of extremely intelligent people get stirred around with thoughts about my day and memories. They sometimes stick to each other like Velcro.
• Strangely enough I can use it to avenge the evil exploits of my colleagues. For example, I have my Windows Mobile cellphone setup to post directly to this blog. Today I took a picture of one of my colleagues eating an egg salad sandwich. This was in revenge for her giving me a hard time relentlessly a week ago. Now, at the touch of a button I can post that picture for anyone to see. I probably won't though, unless she gives me a hard time for blogging again.