One of CFHA Blog's regular contributors, Gonzalo Bacigalupe, is Chilean.  Through his twitter feed (@bacigalupe and @healthglobal) he has been leading the charge to connect ex-patriate Chileans with information about the status of Chile after the recent earthquake and about how to contact loved ones.

Julia, an active board member of a health care professional organization, noticed my recent twitter activity, such as:

The National Day of Listening happens every year, the day after Thanksgiving.  I know it was a while back but due to both a past cfha.net blog and a recent patient encounter I began thinking about this concept again.  This year during National Day of Listening, I chose to interview my father.  He has lived a fulfilling life in his 78 years.  When we sat down to kick the “interview” off he, with sincere curiosity, asked “You are not doing this because you think I’m going to die are you”?  After I debunked this myth of his, we proceeded.  With a digital recorder on the table, we sat and talked over coffee for about two hours.  My entire life, I have had a great communicative relationship with my father but something was different this time.  This time my sole intent was just to listen, nothing else. I had no intentions, no predispositions, no expectations, just open ears. I learned a lot about my father that day that I had never known before.

Have you ever watched Bobby Flay on the Food Network channel beat other chefs and cooks at their own specialty dishes? He always looks shocked when he wins but on the way to the challenge he is confident in his product. This is the exact same way that I see collaborative care models as they face off to an existing method of care. However, like Bobby, there are critical things one needs to appreciate about the context one is entering before proposing changes to it. For example:

If you're reading this blog post, you probably already know that an EMR is an "Electronic Medical Record"--or a computer-based patient chart. Describing an EMR environment is a moving target because our current healthcare system boasts 400+ different EMRs and each brand is constantly upgrading with new components.

I started primarycareshrink.com about 4 years ago as the result of the most obvious difficulty I was facing in developing a primary care behavioral health service (PCBH) at a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) in Chicago, IL:  I couldn't find anyone to hire on.

There exists an opportunity to begin to leverage technology in such a way that we can advance collaborative care in ways only imaginable before. Just as the Collaborative Care Research Network (CCRN) has started increasing the effectiveness research for collaborative care practices, new and emerging technology allows for an advancement of research with large data sets consisting of millions of patients and hundreds of practices. This is a "game changer" that our field must take advantage of to begin to make a stronger research case for collaborative care.

 I have a confession to make.  I'm supposed to love technology.  Why?  Because I'm a "young professional" (28-years-old, to be exact) from the generation that was raised with computers, the internet, and email.  Because I started working in healthcare long after the introduction of the electronic medical record.  And because my peers have hundreds of "Facebook friends," send text messages while driving, and "Twitter" like it's their job.  So here's the confession: I don't love technology.  In fact, it's worse than that.  I worry that technology is eroding the purity of human relationships.

Many of my colleagues and dear friends are still trying to understand what this whole social media buzz is about. They may not have a Twitter account or may wonder how they could use LinkedIn.  Facebook still confuses or scares them.  They often ask me what is so fascinating about "this thing" with social media tools. They wonder what else they could do with their recently acquired iPhone besides making phone calls (check this brief article to start). "What is in there and why investing my precious time?" With email I have enough, they tell me.

First let me tell you a little about our program and how it got started and then I will talk about the role of technology.  Actually, technology was there from the beginning.