Electronic tasks?!? Are you serious?!?!

I recently finished reading “Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande and “How Doctor’s Think” by Jerome Groopman. I would highly recommend them to anyone in Healthcare IT. Because each book touches on how doctors contemplate change, it got me thinking about how physicians may be thinking about all of the upcoming changes in Health IT. While more physicians are accepting of Health IT as time goes on, I still run into physicians who are very hesitant to move to electronic orders and progress notes. I wondered if there was something that would elicit a similar hesitancy for me.

What if someone asked me to significantly change the way I worked on a daily basis, yet expected me to be as productive, or more productive. What if someone asked me to change the way I dealt with my task list – something that I’ve standardized over the course of the last 10 years.

“Wait a minute Huffman – are you comparing your task list with CPOE and electronic Progress Notes” you may be asking? Not really; I’m trying to get a better understanding of what a physician might be thinking when I ask them to change what they have done for years, to a new way of doing it, even if they don’t believe it will be an improvement. Stay with me for a minute…..

People are very passionate about their task lists. If you ask someone how they track their daily tasks you will get a varied response, some paper, some electronic. Some use systems like “Getting Things Done” by David Allen or “Seven Habits” by Stephen Covey. Some keep their tasks in applications like Google Calendar, Remember the Milk, Outlook or Omnifocus. There are hundreds of applications and dozens of iPhone apps to manage your tasks.

I’ve used the same methodology for tracking my daily tasks for the last 10 years – a standard composition notebook and a pen. I use the same system to track which items are done and which items I need to follow up on. I pride myself in rarely loosing track of an issue or task. I can pull one of my old composition notebooks out from 5 years ago, review it, and get the essence of what was going on that day or week. There is emotion on the page – it isn’t just “12 point Times New Roman” staring back at me. (sound familiar?)

I have had numerous conversations with team members about my “system” and why I use it. While I have tried suggested improvements and different systems they never seem to stick and I move back to a notebook and pen. I’m convinced, for me, that the mighty pen and paper work the best! (again a familiar argument).

The next time I’m struggling with a physician conversation about “change” I can now compare that to someone asking me to forever change how I deal with my task list…..and I’m staying on paper…..unless someone wants to pay me $44,000 over five years to go electronic.