Category: SOS Blog

Emergency Alert System Test: Share with your clients

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Several years ago, I signed up with the federal Office of Civil Rights online Privacy listserv so I would get notifications about HIPAA. I have been delighted with that subscription over the years. If you are an organization that provides healthcare services, you too should subscribe.

Today I received a new sort of notice from the listserv…one aimed at informing as many individuals as possible about an upcoming test of the federal Emergency Alert System.

Date:    Thu, 3 Nov 2011 12:11:48 -0400
From:    “OS OCR PrivacyList, OCR (HHS/OS)” <OCRPrivacyList@HHS.GOV>
Subject: First Nationwide Test of the Emergency Alert System; November 9 at 2pm EDT

FIRST NATIONWIDE TEST OF THE EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM
Test to Take Place November 9 at 2 p.m. EDT

Dear Colleagues;

We need your assistance in notifying everyone about the November 9th nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System.  Please help distribute this to all your stakeholders, as far and wide as possible, to ensure the entire community is aware that

As part of our larger efforts to strengthen our nation’s preparedness and resiliency, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will conduct the first nation-wide test of the Emergency Alert System on November 9th at 2pm Eastern Standard Time.

The national Emergency Alert System is an alert and warning system established to enable the President of the United States, if needed, to address the American public during emergencies.  It is another critical communications tool that can protect the public and strengthen our nation’s resiliency.  The National Weather Service, governors, and state and local authorities also use parts of the system to issue more localized emergency alerts.  The test is an important exercise in ensuring that the system is effective in communicating critical information to the public in the event of a real national emergency.

This national test will help federal partners and EAS participants determine the reliability of the system, as well as its effectiveness in notifying the public of emergencies and potential disasters both nationally and regionally.  The test will also provide the FCC and FEMA a chance to identify improvements that are needed to build a new, modernized, and fully accessible Emergency Alert System.

To support the disability community, FEMA has developed a toolkit that will allow you to reach out to your constituents and local partners.  The toolkits, attached here in multiple formats, allow you and your organization to quickly disseminate information about this test.

In addition, we’re also releasing two new videos created to support the outreach efforts of our disability community partners.   FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has long been a champion of the whole community and ensuring that FEMA represents the diversity of the people we serve.  In one video, Neil Mc Devitt, from FEMA’s Office of Disability Integration and Coordination joins Administrator Fugate in outlining the need for the upcoming Emergency Alert System test and the accessibility challenges posed by the test.   The video has American Sign Language, open-captions, and is voiced throughout.   We’re also happy to provide a Spanish version of the message with open-captions.

If you have additional questions for FEMA-Office of Disability Integration and Coordination questions, please contact our office at

Marci Roth
Director
Office of Disability Integration and Coordination

 

*        FEMA Administrator’s Message – http://www.fema.gov/medialibrary/media_records/6407

*        ASL Video: http://www.fema.gov/medialibrary/media_records/6407

*        Spanish Video: http://www.fema.gov/medialibrary/media_records/6408

Please share this information with your constituencies, colleagues, friends, and families.   Remember, on November 9th at 2pm ET, “Don’t stress; it’s only a test.”

I was fascinated at using the HIPAA listserv for this purpose. As I read through the notice, it became clear that FEMA is quite concerned about insuring that disabled individuals of all sorts receive notice of this test so they are not alarmed when the test occurs. Using a listserv that reaches healthcare providers is actually an excellent use of this list. After all, most disabled individuals are in touch with healthcare providers.

Please feel free to pass this information…or even this blog…on to your clients. It is important that consumers of behavioral health and other health services realize that the event scheduled for Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 2pm is a TEST of the Emergency Alert System.

Good for you to know it too!

Thanks for reading and sharing the information in our blog.

Motivation: How do we generate it?

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I have been thinking a good deal lately about how to motivate myself and others in my life. When I was a psychotherapist, I spent lots of time helping patients understand their motivations and utilizing those motivations to help them create change in their lives. Knowing what drives us to do things is important to achieving any of our goals or satisfaction in our lives. Of course, my patients were in my office because they felt the need for change. They already had motivation, albeit a negative one…they were in pain…an internal state that they wanted to get rid of. But they did not know how to make change in their lives; they needed a different set of skills. That is what psychotherapy is good for.

I have not looked at the work on motivation in a long time. In order to write this article, I did what everyone who uses a computer today does….I Googled it. I repeatedly came upon the name of one individual and had to get more information about him. After all, he is not even a psychologist or other researcher.

Daniel Pink is a bestselling author who was at one time Al Gore’s chief speechwriter. His book, Drive, explores the psychological research on motivation and performance. And he finds that business and many people at large have ignored the results of this important research. We treat employees as if they must be rewarded or punished to try to motivate them to perform well…using the proverbial carrot and stick. The research, however, shows that rewards result in poorer performance if any degree of cognitive skill is needed to accomplish a task. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose are the motivators we need to understand.

I have checked Drive out of the library and plan to read it right away. I will let you know the details of what I learn. In the meantime, you can find out some of Dan Pink’s thoughts on motivation and what we do wrong by listening to his TED talk (18:40). If you want a bit more detail, you can listen to him talk to American Psychological Association members at the 2011 Psychologically Healthy Workplace Awards (38:36).

How do you motivate yourself? How do you motivate others? What secrets have you learned about motivating patients? What motivates you to read this? How can I motivate you to make comments?

Please share your thoughts below. Thanks.

 

Health Insurance: How do you feel about yours?

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According to a newsletter aimed at the insurance industry, 70% of comments made about health insurers on social media sites in the past year were negative. FierceHealthPayer reports:

It’s time to face the facts–the American public dislikes health insurance companies. And that’s putting it mildly, considering that 70 percent of all opinions and comments about insurers posted on social media sites in the last year were negative.

(Read more: Insurers should take to social media to combat negativity – FierceHealthPayer http://www.fiercehealthpayer.com/story/insurers-should-take-social-media-combat-negativity/2011-10-07?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal#ixzz1aYo3DrmA 
Subscribe: http://www.fiercehealthpayer.com/signup?sourceform=Viral-Tynt-FierceHealthPayer-FierceHealthPayer)

I can understand some of that negativity. This past summer brought major upheaval for me as I searched for affordable health insurance for our employees. I asked our insurance agent early on to get us quotes. I was appalled at what came back from the company who provides our plan. As a small group (only 8 members plus one spouse) we are subject to huge variations in cost and are very limited in benefit choices. Health insurance is our second largest expense.

I interviewed employee leasing companies and other groups that claim to make you part of a larger group so you can benefit from lower pricing structures. Unfortunately, none of them were able to save us enough money to justify the severe limitation in benefits or the cost of membership. We ultimately bought a plan that increases copays and deductibles, but maintains most of the benefits we had….we think. How the insurer will choose to interpret those benefits when one of us actually needs to take advantage of them remains to be seen.

My experience is no surprise. Employers across the nation were faced with a  9% average increase in family premiums in 2011 while many of us were presented double digit increases, in spite of the recession.

The article mentioned above suggests that insurers should get involved in social media to combat their negative perception by the public. They should

Create a social media policy and then get out into the social world and establish a strong, positive presence. Tweet some healthful recipes, post exercise tips on Facebook, make announcements on Google+.

Whatever your specific strategy, though, make sure you monitor all social media sites for comments made about your company and then contact the poster to try and resolve the problem. Even if you can’t fix the particular issue, say because someone is griping about the lack of universal health insurance, you’ll have made an effort to connect with the public, which over time just might change their perception of the industry. – Dina (@HealthPayer)

In other words, they should get their marketing people to work in the social media sphere. Don’t do anything real to correct the negative perceptions of the public, just do your best to appear to care and to look good. Don’t let anybody realize that one of the major reasons the cost of healthcare is so high in the U.S. is because of the part played by the cost of health insurance.

I was rather distressed by that recommendation. Don’t do anything real…just do your best to appear as if you care about these negative perceptions.

I wonder what your experience is with health insurers. Does your organization provide health insurance for your employees? Is everybody satisfied with their plan and the cost of it? Have you ever made a negative comment about your health insurance on Facebook or Twitter? Ever made a positive one?

Please share your comments below.

Goodbye, Mr. Jobs: Thanks for all you’ve done

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I was a little surprised at my reaction of sadness Wednesday night when I heard of Steve Jobs death. I have never used an Apple computer or any other Apple product, so I could not be considered a fan by anyone’s definition. And yet, I feel a real loss.

I know that many of you were born after 1980. You have never lived in a world without personal computers. Those of us who are a bit older remember a very different world than the one we live in today . . . and one of the primary differences is the universal presence of personal computing devices.

At this moment I am sitting in my doctor’s office writing this post on my phone. Thirty years ago, I might have been reading a book or a journal. I could not have imagined that I might one day be doing this.

But Steve Jobs could imagine it.

The likes of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates envisioned this world and helped make it real. The rest of us get the daily benefit of their ability to innovate. Some of us even got our careers because of their vision.

When Steve Jobs was working on the Apple I, I was finishing my doctorate in clinical psychology and looking forward to a long career as a psychologist. When my partner and I opened our first private practice in 1980, we had a word processor and bought Kaypro 4 computers. The computer seemed like a fun way to work and a powerful tool, so we bought one for each of our desktops. Within five years, we had started Synergistic Office Solutions and Seth was consulting with psychologists, building computers for them, and ultimately writing software for practice management. Because of the creation of an industry that did not exist when I started graduate school, I am twenty years into a second career. Without Steve Jobs and the work he did, I would not be writing to you . . . even though I have never used an Apple product.

In the next few years, we may see the passing of the personal computer into oblivion as tablets and super smartphones and today unimagined devices are created. But we are likely to remember that there was a very small group of incredibly bright, creative and productive individuals who imagined, innovated and then manufactured machines that have changed our lives.

Thanks, Steve.

Please feel free to share your own thoughts and reflections about Steve Jobs and about the changes in our world he helped create.

Electronic Permanence: Changing records and releases

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On September 22, 2011, I attended a webinar sponsored by the Business Operations for Behavioral Health Collaborative, a SAMHSA-funded joint venture of the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare, the National Association of Community Health Centers, NIATx, and the State Associations of Addictions Services (SAAS). The topic of the webinar was Health Information Exchange and Behavioral Health.

This is an area that has interested and concerned me for quite a while. As developers of software for behavioral health providers, SOS has for years been monitoring developments in the arena of Health Information Exchange (HIE). This is the method by which Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software will exchange information among providers and healthcare organizations. The HIE is both the process of exchanging information and any repository of that information for easy access by those with rights to the data.

This is the bugaboo that has always bothered me as well as my colleagues in the behavioral health software trade association to which we belong (Software and Technology Vendors Association). SATVA members are committed to assuring that our products share information only as the law allows and as consumers wish.

Work is currently in progress to assure that a universal method of acquiring patient permission for release of their information is part of any HIE. Such a method would undoubtedly allow a patient to specify providers to whom their treatment and diagnosis information can be released and any providers to whom it cannot be released. But what happens when a patient changes their mind?

Here’s a hypothetical example that jumps into the future by a few years, when all or most healthcare providers have EMRs and are connected into their regional HIEs.

John D. is admitted to the Emergency Room of a local hospital after a panic attack that he interprets as a heart attack. Among the papers that he signs is a release for the ER to access any information in the regional HIE about his health conditions. Since he is not thinking very clearly as he is sure he is dying from a heart attack, he signs everything put in front of him. After he is medicated, stabilized and sent home, he wonders about what he signed and which of his health information will now be available to whom. Does he really want his optometrist to know that he was treated with an anti-anxiety medication and prescribed an antidepressant (which he decided not to take)? Is it necessary for his urologist to have this information? What does he do to protect just that ER visit information and keep it from being sent on to other providers?

And what do our mental health and substance abuse patients do to secure their sensitive information?

This process concerns me because of my experience that once a piece of information has been entered into some large electronic database, getting it out may be near to impossible. Several years ago, I attended a conference in New Jersey. I rented a car, drove to the city in which the conference was held, returned the car and paid my bill in a timely fashion, and returned home.

The next time I needed to rent a car was three months after Katrina flooded New Orleans when my mother and I returned to check on her home and attend the funeral of one of my uncles. For some reason, the car was reserved in my mother’s name…the airline tickets were purchased with her card…even though I had placed my name on everything. The rental agency manager noticed something wrong when we picked up the car; there was a block on my account even though there was no balance. She overrode the block, gave me the keys to the car, and we were on our way. I did not give it another thought.

In several return visits to New Orleans, I again rented cars from the same company and always wound up with a car, not even knowing there continued to be a block on my account. Each time the agent or manager overrode the hold and gave me the keys. In November 2010, we arrived in New Orleans on a Sunday. The agent and assistant manager decided they did not have the authority to override the block on my account and there was no one they could contact to clear it. They refused to rent a car to me and offered no solution. They gave me a phone number I could call on Monday, but did not even offer my 90 year old mother and me transportation to another agency. I cursed and swore I would never rent from their unprofessional agency again and called my brother to come pick us up. Fortunately, he was thinking clearly enough to suggest that we go across the highway to a different company and rent a car there.

I did call the company the next day and eventually got the written apology and clearance of my account that I requested. It took six years for this correction of an error to happen.

What processes will we insist be put in place to assure that patients can change their minds about release of information or correct errors or enter corrected information into their records? What kind of advocacy will be required? What do mental health and substance abuse providers need to do to assure that the privacy of their patients’ sensitive information will be handled as they choose?

Please share your thoughts about HIE and EMRs and where we are going with this process.