Quality indicator data for Q4 2007 has been posted at eCommunity.com/quality.

The data reflect Community's high quality of patient care for indicators in three categories:

• Heart attack
• Congestive heart failure
• Pneumonia

Community's quality data are compared against national hospital averages and are provided for all network hospitals: Community Hospitals North, East, South and Anderson, and The Indiana Heart Hospital.

We also have added a new section for Outpatient Quality of Care. On this page you can review quality measures regarding care provided at physician offices and/or by Community physicians. Quality measures are compared across 2005 - 2007 for diabetic and heart failure patient care, pediatric immunizations, women's health, safety, patient satisfaction and improvement projects.

More information, including national averages for hospital quality data, can be found at http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov

We now have RSS feeds available for our health news! You can select from a number of categories:

• Breaking News
• Breast Health
• Diabetes Health
• For Your Child
• Heart Care
• Men's Health
• Mind and Body
• Women's Health

Breaking news stories are published once a week on Wednesdays. News stories in all other categories are published once a month.

Visit eCommunity.com/news to subscribe.

Not ready to subscribe? You can also just listen to the story by clicking the "Listen" link next to the headline.

Tomorrow our team will be hosting a Web publishing workshop. We've invited members of our marketing and communications departments, leadership, and others involved in development of our brand strategy. We have also invited a couple of our external partners, Compendium Blogware and Custom Scoop, to discuss Web publishing, in particular blogging as it relates to brand strategy.

We plan to educate a bit on the Web publishing tools we have available internally and how content owners within the organization can use them to publish messages and content in a rapid-cycle manner. Our tools include a homegrown CMS, RSS capability, e-mail marketing tools, interactive/rich media, collaborative software, blogging application, etc.

We're also going to dive into how we can use our tools to create a more interactive user experience on our Web site—one that integrates our brand message and effectively communicates Community's services and exceptional experience model to patients, families and employees.

There are many viewpoints and I'm looking forward to a lively discussion with constructive takeaways to help us as we move forward with our content strategies. Stay tuned!

A crucial piece of our health care technology arsenal is a homegrown content management system (CMS) we (read: I) use for publishing our Web content. After a year of design (and redesign) sessions, the brand spanking new "CMS2008" is in production! We are still working out some kinks as is to be expected. However, there are many upgrades: The information architecture is more logical, the WYSIWYG-ness is more user-friendly and the editor functionality is more robust.

In addition to the Web content publishing piece, CMS2008 also contains administrative tools that we can use to mange user-generated content, such as that found in our eCommunity blogs, discussion boards, and SharingSites.

The big idea here is that if we can make our CMS tool easier to use, this will help the content owners distributed across the organization feel empowered to also be active content publishers.

Community's bariatric services has partnered with Medical Animatics, LLC, to provide weight loss surgery patients with access to an online, interactive, media-rich educational program. The program's tools help patients and families learn about upcoming procedures, manage their post-surgical lives and "make healthier lifestyle choices." A highlight of the online tools is a self-paced informed consent agreement that guides patients through the details; this replaces the traditional paper-based consent form. Bariatric patients simply log in to My Informed Choice to interact with the product.

I used to work in the e-learning industry, so I find this company and program interesting, particularly the niche approach the company takes by focusing on scientific and medical content. It will be interesting to see the measurable outcomes of this program in terms of patient understanding and knowledge application as well as any process improvement in bariatric surgery services.

An interesting perspective on physician use of online medical content to inform medical decision-making in order to provide high quality patient care. 

"Every day, in hospitals and physicians' offices across America and increasingly around the world, medical practitioners are doing something revolutionary: They are turning to the Internet for information to enable them to make more informed decisions for their patients."

Watch streaming video webcast or read transcription at
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/548888

At www.eCommunity.com/health we offer a health information library that provides health information for the consumer. The library comes from a third-party provider and most content is reviewed and updated quarterly. Topics are grouped into adult and pediatric health, ranging from allergies to women's health and everything in between.

Questions: In the future will we need to provide physicians and caregivers within our hospitals with online health information to be used for medical decision-making? Will we do this in an effort to control the content and possible ramifications of finding and relaying inaccurate information to patients? How will newcomer health information Web sites geared toward a physician audience be screened or deemed reputable?

Part of our larger content plan for the year is to conduct usability testing across our suite of online tools/applications and our network Web site, www.eCommunity.com. The purpose is to get feedback from as many audiences as possible and use that feedback to make our applications and Web site easier to use.

Last week I went to Community Regional Cancer Center on our Community Hospital North campus and met with three patients who worked with our SharingSite application. SharingSite is an online blogging tool for patients, family members or caregivers. The owner of the SharingSite can post updates and upload photos for their invited list of folks to see. It's a convenient way for people who are distributed across the country to get updates on a loved one's care. Lots of new parents have been using SharingSite to share photos of new babies and family.

With the help of our "portable usability lab" (thanks to Brian for helping me with that setup) I videotaped each patient's session and also ran a screencapture program in the background of the computer to record mouse movement, clicks, etc.

Overall patients praised the concept of SharingSite as a mechanism for sharing information about patient progress or medical conditions and procedures. There were also usability issues that I will take back to the team with recommendations for fixes. It is a real eye-opener to watch users who are self-proclaimed computer novices and in an older age group work with an application like SharingSite. This experience encourages me to think about better ways to design our tools for seniors in particular.

Thank you to the patients, Community Regional Cancer Center, and my team who helped this project happen!

Interested in participating in a usability session for Community Health Network? Please leave me a comment if you are interested in participating in a usability session for one of our applications. A typical session takes about an hour and participants are compensated with a gift card.

Greetings! I'm Maggie, the web content manager for Community Health Network. What this means is I handle a variety of content needs and emergencies related to all things web-o-sphere, including the following:

• public Web site - www.eCommunity.com
• network intranet
• internal business unit portals
• physician practice Web sites
• other associated entity Web sites
• internal/external Web applications

I'll be blogging here about my experiences as a content monkey: the good, the bad and the ugly, the victories and defeats, the desperate runs to Starbucks....

When all is said and done, content is an interesting beast, highly dynamic yet frighteningly permanent. Every day holds new and interesting challenges as I (and my comrades on the e-business team) tread the murky waters of the industry we call e-healthcare.

See you soon!