Healthcare Optimism and LinkedIn

Some of you might be wondering how I grouped these two topics together. It’s simple. I recently was invited to participate in LinkedIn’s Influencer program and so I’ve written a few posts on the LinkedIn platform to see how it works. It’s been a hit or miss experience so far, but I’m intrigued by what they’re doing.

It turns out, my first post on the LinkedIn Influencer platform was titled “Why We Should be Optimistic in Healthcare.” What’s amazing to me is that the post is still getting a ton of traffic and social media tweets. I think that I struck a chord.

I think if we’re honest, we often like to kind of dwell in the challenges that we face every day in healthcare. Sometimes it’s hard to take a look at what we’re doing and be optimistic about the future of healthcare. However, when you take a second to step back from the day to day grind and challenges, there is a lot to be optimistic about in healthcare.

If I hearken back to my first job in healthcare, I’m reminded of all the times I told someone about my new job. I always highlighted how cool it would be if something I did in healthcare could actually save someone’s life. An ambitious goal indeed, but it’s the reality of working in healthcare. Now that I’ve worked in healthcare a number of years, my view has slightly changed. I still love the idea that I could save someone’s life, but I love just as much the ability to make someone’s life better.

Let’s not forget the potential of the work we do. It’s incredibly important.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

  • As a physician, I understand your statement:
    “how cool it would be if something I did in healthcare could actually save someone’s life”

    As a non-physician, you and your colleagues need to know that this privilege comes with tremendous rwesponsibility.

    Poorly designned EHRs that capriciously change an established clinical workflow, that take physician’s attention away from the patient and to the keyboard, and that increase the workload of a physician, taking time and attention away from the patient, and will all likely cost lives.

    The next time your software hurts a physician, remember that this will likely trickle down to hurting the patient. In many cases hurting the patient’s quality of life and in some cases causing loss of life.

    Maybe HIT professionals should take the Hippocratic oath, paying attention ot the line: “First, do no harm”.

  • Like the idea of making someone’s life better or trying to make it better. I think that would also be palatable to Providers without encroaching on the field of good things they do and how vital they are to the population in general.
    Having said that, I might also add “…………life better while making the process efficient”; and again I do not mean the actual healthcare tasks only the Providers can actually do but all the other processes associated.

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