Posted by Ken Accardi on Thu, Aug 26, 2010 @ 06:33 PM
The Home Care Software Geek posts in this blog don't talk about Home Care Nursing Software, Private Duty Telephony, DME Delivery Software, Home Infusion Care Management or the other topics we focus on regularly at Ankota. Instead, these posts are intended to keep our readers up to date with technology trends that might be useful to your agencies, such as social media technologies, mobile devices, and what's happening from the big-boys like Microsoft, Google and Apple.
If your home care agency sometimes has conference calls, you might enjoy this funny video about conference calls. It's especially funny because it's so realistic... Enjoy!
Note that if you'd like to be able to hold conference calls, I've been happy with the service we get from www.FreeConferenceCall.com. The service has good quality, 24 hour support, and nice reporting (they send you an email after each call saying who dialed in, at what time and from what number). Also, the service is absolutely free (unless you want a toll-free number or another of their paid services).
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Fri, Jul 30, 2010 @ 07:25 AM
Daniel H. Pink is the author of four provocative books about the changing world of work — including the New York Times bestsellers, A Whole New Mind and Drive, which together have been translated into 28 languages. His research and books are about motivation, and more specifically about debunking the conventional wisdom that money is the best motivator. Instead, he creates a compelling case that the most important motivators are as follows:
- Autonomy - the urge to direct our own lives
- Mastery - the desire to get better at something that matters
- Purpose - The yearning to contribure to something larger than ourselves
If these are the motivators, than we can understand clearly why Home Care can be a fantastic profession.
Dan lays out a fairly compelling set of proof of his argument including the results of scientific experiments and real world examples. One example he uses is about online encyclopedias where he compares and contrasts Microsoft's Encarta - a well managed initiative with pay bonus and incentives, with Wikipedia - an encyclopedia that you contribute to if you're passionate about it and for which you receive no compensation. In Dan's words, "Ten years ago, no sober economist would have predicted that Wikipedia would beat out Encarta", but as we know, it did.
This first video is my favorite of the two. While Dan speaks, a cartoon animator depicts his story. It's 10 minutes long and you can see it by clicking on the picture below.
The second version is a stage presentation given by Dan which is 18 minutes below.
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Wed, May 19, 2010 @ 05:48 AM
One of my favorite authors and professors is Clayton 
Christensen from the Harvard Business School. He has written numerous books about disruptive innovation - the kind of innovations that often go on to replace the way something is done. More recently he wrote The Innovator's Prescription, which was named as Ankota's Book of the Year for 2009. Here, thanks to BigThink.com is a 10 minutes video of Dr. Christensen explaining these key concepts. Home Care and Private Duty Care organizations should realize our opportunity to be a major part of the most needed innovation in healthcare today. Enjoy the video.
Some leading candidates for Ankota's book of the year in 2010 are The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande, and Healthcare Won't Transform Itself, by George Halverson. Check out our blog posts on these books by clicking their links.
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Fri, Mar 05, 2010 @ 01:35 PM
Many of the people interested in this blog want to be pioneers in 
changing the delivery of healthcare. This entertaining and informative video is a "must see". It features Eric Topol, MD who is a cardiologist and geneticist and is the Director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute. A more complete bio for Dr. Topol is below. The challenge for each of you is to think about the technologies shown in the video, many of which are available today, and to think how it can bring individualized medicine and home care to the next level. Enjoy!
The video is courtesy of www.ted.com
The following bio for Dr. Topol is courtesy of Wikipedia:
Eric Topol, M.D. is a noted American cardiologist, geneticist and administrator. He is the Director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, in La Jolla, California, which is a National Institutes of Health funded flagship grant, to accelerate research to change medicine. He also serves as the Chief Academic Officer for Scripps Health, a Professor of Translational Genomics at The Scripps Research Institute, and was recently named The Gary and Mary West Chair of Innovative Medicine. In addition, he serves on the Board of the West Wireless Health Institute as Chief Medical Officer.
In 2008, Topol launched an impressive large-scale long-term study of personal genetic testing to assess its impact on people who choose to get tested.[1] Through the Scripps Genomic Health Initiative, his team is following 10,000 people who take a Navigenics genetic test to see if the knowledge they glean from the process encourages them to improve their lifestyle and get regular and recommended health care. Topol's team is also assessing the psychological impact of genetic testing, and whether participants are able to prevent or delay diseases such as type 2 diabetes, some cancers, Alzheimer's disease and more by taking action after getting their results.[2] Besides the Scripps Translational Science Institute, study partners include Navigenics, Affymetrix and Microsoft.
Before this, he was Professor of Genetics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He was the Founder of the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University.[3] Prior to moving to Case Western, Topol was Chairman of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic where he is widely credited [4] with leading its cardiovascular program to the topmost position in the US. Topol left the Cleveland Clinic in early 2006 after drawing "attention to the mounting tensions between the clinic's research mission and its deep ties to the businesses that finance that research."[5]
Topol gained prominence as the first physician researcher to raise questions about the safety of Vioxx. He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He was named Doctor of the Decade by the Institute for Scientific Information for being one of the top 10 most cited medical researchers.
Ankota is the pioneering company in the field of Healthcare Delivery Management (HDM) and is dedicated to improving the quality and efficiency of the delivery of care outside of the hospital setting. Ankota offers products to improve the efficiency of home care, private duty care, medical equipment delivery, and specialty home care services including infusion therapy, respiratory therapy and home physical therapy. In addition, Ankota does research and development into advanced care management technologies to promote aging in place. For more information please contact us or visit http://www.ankota.com/.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Thu, Feb 11, 2010 @ 07:50 AM
This video is certainly related to home care scheduling and dispatch, but I'm sharing it mostly because it's a great human story. Please enjoy this true story of a 5-year old girl named Savannah calling 911 to get help for her dad.
(note: this will open in a new window - sorry for that!)
This is one that I'll definitely share with my kids. It might even find it's way into Ankota's dispatcher training...
Posted by Ken Accardi on Mon, Dec 14, 2009 @ 10:07 AM
George Halvorson, Chairman and CEO of Kaiser Permanente, has proven the thesis of better care at lower cost time and time again. He is an excellent speaker who can answer difficult healthcare questions easily, in plain English, always citing outcomes and costs. He also does a great job focusing on what's important and avoiding the "issue of the day" banter that the media gets caught up in. So, if you want to get up to speed on the potential of healthcare reform without any politics, I'd receommend that you listen to George.
Thevideo interview below was conducted by Peter Hopkins, President and Co-founder of BigThink.com. The interview lasts almost an hour, but I highly recommend it for the following reasons:
- It points out the issues in health care that really matter
- It is driven by facts - costs and outcomes
- It shares best practices
- It will make you smarter than everyone else at the water cooler or the Christmas Party
Enjoy the video!
From and Ankota perspective, this interview is another great example that validates the promise and importance of healthcare delivery management. Regarding electronic medical records, Mr. Halvorson gives clear examples of how their value will be realized when they are used for coordination of care. He also talks about numerous conditions, such as Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) where hospitalizations can be cut in half by applying the home care and telehealth based best practices that exist today.
If you're looking to better coordinate care between doctors, hospitals, home care and patients, we'd like to help. Please download our whitepaper on transitional care here, or contact Ankota to let us know how we can help you provide better outcomes at lower cost.