Revenue Cycle University

I've been extremely busy lately, Logical Steps has been rolling out Revenue Cycle University with "go live" dates this summer. This is part of Logical Steps' latest joint venture with the amazing folks at Zimmerman. In this venture, In this venture, we've rolled out 20+ courses to a major health system in New York and are in the process of rolling out 10 new courses to 6 clients. Each course must be customized for the client, for a total of 60 courses, not to mention demo courses!

As part of this initiative, we're also building a super cool learning system. I dare not say elearning system because that term has lost its meaning to me with all of the varieties, standards and actual ways that people learn online. That said, our system is leveraging the best from our work with new media platform R&D including social media, animations, closed-loop feedback, healthcare specific asset libraries and many more exciting features.

Considering that we have teams in US, Singapore and India working on this, we're managing 3 different holiday schedules. Each course has dozens of tasks and combined with the system development tasks, our current project plan has almost 1800 tasks. Whew!

TED Talks: be careful with plastic!

World ministers call for green economy

A meeting of environment ministers from around the world in Kenya has called for a 'global green new deal' that will see increased job creation and economic growth.

Click here for full story.

2008 Latest Edition - Did You Know 3.0 - From Meeting in Rome this Year

Worrisome video about our government

In this video of C-Span, Rep Paul Kanjorski (D-Penn, 11th District), the Capital Markets Subcommittee Chairman, explains the circumstances around the initial $700 billion bailout payment.

It is worrisome that he explains that he doesn't understand finance and he doesn't know what to do.

I don't think he would have admitted this except he was verbally attacked by an angry caller. It reminds me of what a wise man once told me: people always reveal more when they are desperate. In this case, Rep Kanjorski was desperate to defend himself. 

Funny cartoons describing game theory!

Sample comics from Raph Koster's book "A theory of fun". 

Kenya has Geothermic Energy!

Check out this movie for more. This could important for Narok, Kenya's vision of becoming Africa's first "green city".

Doctors make less mistakes using checklists

In a study published by the New England Journal of Medical, surgeons can reduce the rate of major complications from 11% to 7% by using basic checklists. Additionally, deaths dropped nearly in half with a rate of 1.5% going down to 0.8% using checklists.

I hypothesize that checklists can help in less critical circumstances too.

Over lunch I read The Death of Process, PERIOD! 

Author Max J. Pucher tries to tackle some tough topics about trying to follow processes at work and what really matters when considering improving business. He evokes agile thoughts vs traditional project management concepts. 

Learning Organizations

Here's a great passage from Wikipedia that captures the essence of what we're helping clients achieve through our organizational e-learning platform and methodology. 

Learning organizations are those that have in place systems, mechanisms and processes, that are used to continually enhance their capabilities and those who work with it or for it, to achieve sustainable objectives – for themselves and the communities in which they participate.

The important points to note about this definition are that learning organizations:
– Are adaptive to their external environment
– Continually enhance their capability to change/adapt
– Develop collective as well as individual learning
– Use the results of learning to achieve better results.

Speed diagramming class

Here are Susan, Andrea, Amanda and Ann during a speed diagramming exercise. 

Just read an article on Singapore's economy in the Walls Street Journal. 

Having worked in Asia through the economic downturn in 1998, I know it can be tough. Back in those days, I worked for LANSA under the direction of Gordon Davies and was charged with supporting our partner network in Asia. In such times, everyone had to cut back because spending dropped. I learned some lessons about partnering. 

First of all, in bad times, it's important to support partners all the more because they're faced with cut backs and their ability to service clients may drop. By stepping in to field questions and introduce ideas that are working elsewhere, it's possible to increase sales, quality of support and maintain education minimums. 

Secondly, when the sky is falling morale is low. Maintaining a positive attitude is contagious that can spread to partners. 

Also, traditional targets have to be taken with a grain of salt. Partners will already be trying to put on their best face to clients. There's little need to pressurize partners to meet numbers that are no longer tied to reality. Instead, meet with partners to formulate new targets based on what they see in their local market. This provides excellent market intelligence too. This can also help uncover if any partners are headed towards disaster. Let me tell you a story...

Before I arrived on the scene in Asia, one of LANSA's partners with 30 clients one day announced they were closing their doors. There had been no warning and no chance to prepare for us to minimize the damage to LANSA's local reputation and future support contracts. As result the market shunned LANSA. However, because LANSA was present during the 1998 economic downturn, we built a new reputation in this market and came out of the recession with doors opened again.

At Zimmerman HQ

Here's a picture of me, Vish, Amanda, Andrea and Mike.

Vish shoveling snow

Here are some pictures of Vish shoveling snow. We had to dig ourselves after a snow storm to make some meetings in Milwaukee!

Assessments

Today I came across a Wikipedia entry on Assessments.  The entry begins by stating that an assessment is "the process of documenting, usually in measurable terms, knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs". 

It struck me that scholastic and organization training departments attempt to assess knowledge and skills while advertising and political entities attempt to assess attitudes and beliefs. 

Who assesses knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs besides the CIA?

How the US ranks internationally in Math and Science

For all of the criticism against the US educational system, it's nice to see that we haven't totally lost it, although there's clearly room for improvement. An article by USA Today discusses the results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS.

"It's discouraging," says Francis Eberle, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association. "Other countries are investing and we can see their progress," he says. "Do we want to be average?"

That's a hard question to answer because the competition of education around the world is fierce. To be above average requires budgets and vision. And schools are institutions which are usually resistant to change and we're talking about our nation's children so we're naturally conservative. 

Demographics of Internet & Mobile Usage

General Demographics of US Adults

Baby Boomers

US Teens

US College Students

General US population - video streamers

US Unique Views for TV, Online and Mobile Video by Gender

US Unique Views of TV, Online and Mobile Video by Age

Online and Mobile Usage of US Internet Users by Age

Using the Mac: crawling

Last weekend I switched from PC to Mac. All in all it's been pretty painless. There were a couple of obstacles that I encountered. 

For example, I almost did not buy a Mac because when ordering software through apple.com the reviews for Microsoft Office 2008 were so bad that I was scared away. Like most professionals, I need Word, Excel, PowerPoint and an email client. However, after reading through other online reviews and re-reading the reviews on apple.com I realized that Microsoft Office is fine for most Mac users. It's just there are problems with Exchange Server and lack of support for BookEnds. If you're using these, life may be bad. The other point made in the reviews is that there are not many new features added since the 2004 version. As I'm not using Exchange Server, BookEnds and MS Office 2004, 95% of the comments didn't apply to me. It took me a couple of read throughs to realize this! I bought Mac and have been using it for a week now.

One issue with Microsoft Entourage is that there's no ability to set the amount of time before an email account times out.  That's kind of pathetic as it's basic functionality for an email client and one of my colleagues has been forced to stay with gmail until we can figure out a work around. In exploring this time out issue, it becomes obvious that there are a lot of people writing about this, but it doesn't show up in Microsoft's support pages. If anyone discovers a work around for this, please let me know. 

Another minor point of frustration is that Skype operates slightly differently on Mac. My woes probably won't affect 99% of Skype users. I use Skype for business. I conference in colleagues from Singapore and India into calls in the US. When dialing into a conference line I'm asked to dial the conference code and press the hash ('#') key. Skype provides a nifty dialpad for this. However, this dialpad is not available if you're already in conference mode (e.g. have another caller in a Skype call). Thus I need to dial into a conference call, enter the code and then can initiate other Skype calls to conference in my colleagues. It's a pain to be sure, but the price is right so it's worth tolerating. I wrote to Skype about this problem, but received a general response explaining that there is a dialpad in Skype. The Skype support personnel did not understand that the dialpad isn't usable for entering a conference code while in a Skype conference.  :(

Ted is king!

I've enjoyed watching videos at Ted.com for a year or so now. What an inspiring organization! I wanted to highlight a couple that really resonated with me today.

The first is by Journalist-provocateur Andrew Mwenda of Uganda who claims that aid by the west has caused Africa to focus on aid instead of independence. It's a classic case of do you feed the poor or teach them to fish?



The second is by Jeff Skoll who struck me as a person who is really trying to make this world a better place. Check it out below.



Let me know if you have any favorite TED videos.

Web Conversation Rates

I just came across this Q&A on LunaMetrics.com/blog. Pretty thought provoking!