Simple Data Solutions - Simple For You, Not So Much For Me

Ever thought about starting your own business? Entrepreneur, according to Dictionary.com is "A person who organizes and manages any enterprise, esp. a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk." For the past several months I've been diligently working toward opening a small start-up, which should be ready for prime-time within the next couple of months.  It has been an exciting, scary, exhausting, major-learning-curve, process.  Did I mention exhausting?  My eyes are about to fall out of my head from so many late nights staring at a computer screen! The business is SimpleDataSolutions.com, and the first product strangely enough, has not a thing to do with credentialing, privileging, or medical staff administration.  It does have to do with healthcare, and complying with CMS Conditions of Participation however, so maybe it's not such a stretch after all. One of my "day job" co-workers just released a book and audio CD, "Complying With CMS Patient Grievance Regulations", which is designed to help hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers understand and meet CMS and Joint Commission regulations and standards regarding patient rights.  (Note: Final CMS Rules are pending for ASCs.) As she was working on the book, she kept telling me that understanding regulations is only part of the problem healthcare organizations face; developing a system for tracking patient concerns, and the hospital or ASC's response to those concerns, is the other part. I don't generally worry too much about big organizations with large budgets as they have a multitude of options.  Smaller hospitals, and many of the 4,000 or so Ambulatory Surgery Centers around the country, are another matter.  I'm finding that often they are developing paper-based logs, or using an Excel spreadsheet, to help them track patient concerns and complaints. So, being the long-standing purveyor of "I'll just whip up a little Microsoft Access database we can use to track that..." I got to work, thinking "How hard can it be?"  Okay, time for honesty, it has been much more challenging than I originally thought.  I've learned to dread the words, "This is great Rita, but what about...?"  Aarghghh!  The database is just about done.  Now I'm working on license agreements and user instructions.  Yuk!  However, there's another new experience just over the horizon... I'm about to star in my very own (thankfully non-music) video production!  Users will have another learning option besides slogging through a boring technical manual.  I'll let you know how that goes.  Rumor has it the videographer has high production standards, so we'll see how he does working with a novice. Nothing ventured, nothing gained... gulp!