Having a bad day

Last Wednesday was a bad day. I could not look at my scanned documents (a phone call to helpdesk), then I had trouble accessing the server and finally could not access it at all (another call to helpdesk). The Passover Seder was that night and I had to leave on time; I was also short of patience and very irritated. My lab is still not coming in, and I will be sending off another email to the lab company to remind them to start sending electronic reports. Some scanned images are printing as landscape instead of portrait, with nicely elongated letters. My Tablet crashed.

I also got a phone call from a patient asking why her glyburide was changed to bid. Her pharmacist noticed and called her. It is very easy to choose "bid" from the drop down list instead of "od". This was for one of the first prescriptions I wrote, on March 23rd. I apologized, and explained why this happened. It is challenging for me to transfer every single prescription to the EMR, and I am now very paranoid and very careful about re-reading what I print. As I was talking to her, I updated the glyburide order on the chart; at least I know that I cannot make that mistake when I refill her medications.

I have to remind myself to expect problems, especially at start-up. Every time I install a new program on my home PC I have glitches, and EMRs are so much more complex. This is where having support really helps; if you don't have this, days like last Wednesday can turn from bad heartburn to major disaster. Most of the time, when I call the helpdesk, they can help me; sometimes they take my computer over remotely and fix the problem. I also get screenshots emailed to me, so I know what to do the next time. Sometimes the person at the helpdesk can't help me right away, and then I get a "ticket", which is a number that they use to track my query. I get an email or a phone call sometime later. The "ticket" seems to be for annoying but not critical problems.

Problem solving is also much easier if you are part of a group. Our IT lead is not shy about making her views known (you go girl), and I've just received an emailed copy of her communication about the landscape printing problem; it is the same at her office. We all have similar hardware and software, so you can see pretty quickly what is a local problem in one office and what is a software glitch that needs to be fixed for the whole group.

I survived; Thursday was a better day, and then I was off for the long week-end.

Michelle