Meaningful Use Timeline
The Health IT Policy Committee convened for a meeting in Washington, DC on December 15, 2009. The purpose of the meeting was for the Committee to receive reports from its different workgroups and to listen to testimony from Health Plans on the use of directories and registries.
The beginning of March we had four auditors in the office for a week. While they were here the snacks and drinks in the vending machines were flying off the shelves, with sales nearly doubling from the previous week. With those numbers, I’m thinking that our auditors were verifying the quality of more than just our books. Oinkers?
Now, although the auditors may have purchased a snack or two, I doubt we can attribute the major increase in snacking to just those four people. The average snack level of the entire office must have increased during the audit.
Morrena, who restocks our vending machines, said: “I can always tell how stressed the office is by how fast the drinks and snacks go out of the vending machines. When the auditors were here I couldn’t keep it stocked.”
Stress in the work place can be expensive. The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine reports that: “Health care expenditures are nearly 50% greater for workers who report high levels of stress.”
Not only are people eating more junk food, which is unhealthy, they are feeling more stress at work. Vending machine inventory turnover can give managers more than an ethereal way to quantify the stress level of their employees and office.
Seasonality is the idea that business volume ebbs and flows at different times. While landscapers and lawnmowers know that their busy season coincides with summer, seasonality is affected by a lot more than just the weather. Retailers’ busy season coincides with holiday shopping (of course), wedding season is in the summer, and so on.
Check out http://www.google.com/trends to view the seasonality of any keyword search.
I added about 100 new Utah businesses to the list this week. The new list of firms comes from the MoutainWest Capitol Network of fastest growing Utah companies by revenue. This is a good list to be familiar with.
Note that most firms dropped in rank, primarily because of the extra firms added to the list, but notice that that the American Academy of Professional Coders was the only firm to increase in rank.
Add your comments below to request consideration for next months’ index. Read more…
Someone Should be Asking for More Work
So you finally got that IT project done and after all the hassles and bugs, things seem to be working smoothly. Your anxiety levels are returning back to normal and your managers seem to have the new processes under control. But what about your other employees? What are they doing now? Since the IT project helped automate things, how are your employees using their extra time? You probably answered in your mind, “I don’t know” or “I think they’re doing ____.”
I’ll bet your data entry employees haven’t come in to your office, or their managers’, and asked what they need to do next. Now they’re less efficient because they’re doing less work in the same amount of time as they had before. But, if you do have an employee who came to ask for more work, give them a bonus. They’re probably worth keeping around.
I’m a huge fan of performance based compensation. This Compare Hospital tool from the Department of Health and Human services should help empower health care patients to avoid poor health care treatment, and what to expect in terms of both treatment and cost.
The Hospital Compare tool lets you compare 1) how well your local hospitals care for their adult patients, 2) the RESULT of care or treatment – whether they lived or died within 30 days of treatment, 3) what patients are saying about their recent hospital stay, and 4) how much Medicare hospitals paid on average for certain conditions or procedures.
You should really check out your local hospitals, but return and let me know if you were surprised at the results of your local hospitals, like I was? Have you shared this with your friends and family, because it could save their lives – literally.
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If your business model requires employees to help you provide your good or service, then being able to identify: who is looking for jobs (and more specifically Utah jobs), where they live, and how to reach them can help you fill your job openings. This post shows how you can use Google Trends to find people looking for jobs.
At work we’ve been looking into advertising with Business.com. I’ve been corresponding with them about their systems, ad serving technology, and giving them a hard time – like I always give ad sales reps. A colleague walked in on my phone call with them and was intrigued because he knew something about advertising with them that I didn’t know at the time.
He prompted me to put the call on speaker phone, so I did and muted it as the sales guy kept talking. My colleague, who had advertised with Business.com while in a different industry, told me to key in a couple keywords at Business.com. I keyed in the phrase and we started scrolling down through the results. We got about 2/3 of the way down the page and just like he had predicted there was his previous employer’s listing.
I’d like to start tracking innovative Utah companies and publishing their online progress, or regress every month. We can use this type of list for a lot of things, but I’d like to show where internet professionals can look to for a good, local, example of good online strategies. As well, it’s pretty neat to think about working for the top firms, if a corporate job is your thing.
Index Description
As you will see, this internet rank index for Utah companies is composed of the estimates from Alexa and Compete rankings, and the two estimates are averaged. The list is then sorted with the highest rank first.
