What the doc?

Writing was my thing, my magnificent obsession. But I became a surgeon. Go figure. I could therefore sit down by the fireplace every other rainy Saturday evening, telling my grandkids utterly weird OR stories….had I not come to realize that the weirdest part of the hospital story doesn’t actually take place on the operating table.

As a Chief of Surgery grown CMIO grown independent Healthcare IT consultant then CMIO and surgeon again, I’ve seen it all in what became my area of expertise over time: electronic medical records and clinical documentation. From project hopes to nightmare rollouts, from large US hospitals to a mid-sized UK practice, I'm not short of stories to tell my wife over Thai takeaway.

But since she requested some time off from from my geeky rambling to complete yet another guilt-free reading round of Fifty Shades or Grey, I thought it was time for the blog. But don't worry, I shall keep the long stories short and entertaining...short stories of great expectations, wonderful lies, good soldiers and journeys to the end of the night.

All right, a few grapes of warth might be fueling this blog in the first place. Frustration at this, that, them, the system, you name it, but also myself, for not fighting the right battles, for not asking the right questions, for failing to lead healthcare on the right digital track so far. But not to worry, I shall not let frustration sink like a dead brain in formalin. As a true surgeon, I need to cut it open, explore it, whack the tumor out and share a few lessons learnt.

I shall also crack back the drain on software vendors, X-ray their marketing crap and see through their fifty shades of grey talk. So that you and I succeed today where I failed yesterday, so that we finally turn lead into gold, bad frustration into good questions; good questions into better decisions; better decisions into better healthcare. So that we stop ESBAMing taxpayers' money. So that we stop “repeating the same mistakes over and over again expecting a different result each time.” (Einstein’s definition of insanity). Only then will my obsession deserve to be called magnificent.