November 2012
2 posts
2 tags
San Francisco: Let's do a Red Cross blood drive
Ever since Hurricane Sandy hit, I’ve been sitting here unable to tear myself away from the news about friends and loved ones, about places I’ve lived and used to go as a little girl. I’m feeling far away and helpless.
Giving money is hugely important, and if you haven’t done so yet, please do. There are many ways to donate money, both for people and for animals. But giving...
1 tag
The Thread That Binds
A few years ago, when Tumblr was going through some of its earlier growing pains (as opposed to just its regular pains), I was a very dedicated Flickr user, relying on it both as a way to share my photography and as a home to a beloved community. There was a period when Tumblr users were taking photographs from everyone they could, removing all attribution and sometimes even the embedded data, and...
January 2012
2 posts
Not Either/Or: Doctors and Algorithms
Almost ten years ago, I wrote a thesis for a Master’s degree at Georgetown. It was about the artistic representation of the machine in human form. I was curious about the human drive to create cyborgs and robots and machines that look and behave like us, and what it means for us to also have the fear that seems to crop up in so many movies and books: The fear that the cyborgs and robots and...
January 10th: Speaking at BayCHI
A quick bit of news, for those of you in and around the Bay Area: I’m speaking next Tuesday on my research at BayCHI, held at PARC in Palo Alto. Please join me! Go here for more information.
Here are the details on my talk:
On or Off the Record? Organizational Culture and The Physician Experience Implementing Electronic Health Records Leah Reich, XpcXpts
Electronic Health Records (EHRs)...
December 2011
7 posts
froggeek asked: I'm really on-board with Cary about the ego thing. I worked in medical sales and training for almost 8 years, focusing mainly on MDs and DCs (Chiropractors). The MDs were typically bright, decent guys, but their egos sometimes made it difficult to teach them anything, or even to get them to just LISTEN to what I was trying to say - even when I knew WAY more than they did on the subject at...
monkeyfrog asked: Nurses have an entirely different approach and philosophy from doctors. Our tasks overlap, but the approach is so different on some issues it's like choosing between a surgeon and a chiropractor. The biggest problem the nurses I know have with doctors is close minded arrogance, not knowledge problems. Just ego. I could go on at great length about this, having worked in hospital, clinic, and...
Doctors, Nurses, and the Credential Crisis:...
As you may have noticed these past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a great deal about anti-doctor sentiment. Whether it’s at a party or at lunch, on Twitter or in comments on news articles or on blog posts, there’s this anger at doctors. Doctors do their jobs poorly, doctors are trained “wrong” from the get-go, doctors should simply be replaced by nurses because nurses...
Building a We out of a "To Me" Nation
Last week I wrote on the idea of connection. How has the way in which we connect to one another, not only as people in society but as patients and physicians, changed? And how has it affected the patient/physician relationship?
I received two fantastic comments from Ian Welsh that I didn’t want to respond to in the comments because it’s worth bringing the discussion out into the open,...
Patients and Physicians: Frayed Edges
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the doctor/patient relationship.
When I conducted my research, I wasn’t able to observe the physicians interacting with their patients due to privacy issues and the approval I was granted by my university’s review board, but I observed the physicians as they conducted a lot of clinical work and spoke to them at length about patient care....
Symbolic Exclusion in a Diverse Democracy: A...
Last week, Reihan Salam responded to my piece on symbolic exclusion. He discussed how symbolic exclusion can be possibly used to understand where disagreements in diverse democracies are so hard to resolve.
Salam makes particular note of the idea that social exclusion is not a linear hierarchy but rather a set multiple of parallel hierarchies. I agree: social exclusion is no longer the...
November 2011
1 post
Eat the Change You Want to See in the World
I’ll get back to EHR, ethnography, and culture next week. This feels a little more important.
Last night I watched an episode of Chopped that made me cry. Four lunch ladies - who should rightly be called School Chefs - competed against one another. I wasn’t the only one who cried, either. Guest judge and White House chef Sam Kass was totally crying, as were judges Amanda Freitag and...
October 2011
1 post
5 tags
Ethnographic Research: What is it? How do you...
About a month and a half ago, I went to a workshop just outside of Santa Barbara. The workshop was for ATLAS.ti, the software I use to code data from the qualitative research I conduct. It was a great workshop, and I highly recommend it - in fact, if I could take it again, I would. That’s how good it was.
But one of my absolute favorite moments had nothing to do with the software. Nick...
September 2011
2 posts
My Research: How Did I Get There?
Today I planned to give you an overview of my research project but it occurred to me: before I get there, I should tell you how I got there. One of the first questions people ask when I tell them about my dissertation is how I became interested in electronic health records. Unlike many people who have studied health IT or work with informatics, I didn’t come through healthcare.
I’ve...
3 tags
It's official!
Three weeks ago, I finished my dissertation for good and submitted it, revised and formatted, to the UC Irvine library. Two days later, on September 1, 2011, I handed over my signed paperwork to the graduate office completing the requirements for the conferral of my degree.
As the newly-minted Dr. Reich who has a little more time on her hands now that she’s not working on revisions and...
May 2011
2 posts
4 tags
5 tags
Digitizing workflows →
And we are back!
Sorry for the long delay, especially when things were so new around here. I made an executive decision to get the draft of my dissertation FINISHED - which I did - so my writing efforts were tied up temporarily. But there’s so much to talk about, so let’s get back to it, shall we?
chrisereneta:
leahreich:
It’s 2011. Why isn’t every single doctor in this country...
March 2011
2 posts
2 tags
So over the past week, while I’ve been working on edits to my dissertation and prepping for a job interview on the other coast, I’ve been thinking a lot about the great responses you guys gave to my first post here. Before I go off in another direction, I want to reply to some of them.
healthpolitics:
Health care is a complex system. And American health care is a distinct beast...
6 tags
E-H-R, where are you?
It’s 2011. Why isn’t every single doctor in this country on electronic health records?
You’ve probably wondered that at some point. When you’ve gone to the doctor and wondered why, as she flips through a manila folder, she doesn’t just get a computer system. Or why her information can’t easily be sent to another doctor and no one knows what anyone else is doing...
