GTD in healthcare - request for questions/issues

[tej]

Serendipitously, I may (or may not) be chosen to participate in a conference call with David in the upcoming weeks. He'll be giving a one day seminar at my workplace, a large healthcare organization (hint: hospital) in about a month.

I believe the conference call is to discuss issues unique to implementing GTD in a healthcare workplace.

So I'm opening the floor: if your work in healthcare, what issues/problems do you have in getting things done, or implementing GTD?

If I get a chance to ask these questions, I'll post the answers back to this board

[Julian]

I find many GTD-related challenges working in the hospital (MD). Different days bring different support system constraints, and working in multiple environments complicates GTD "collecting" and matching context to NA.

System Mechanics:
When I'm in the operating room, only a PDA, small notebook, or 3x5 cards fit in scrub-suit pockets. I'm not a fan of PDAs for data entry (but they are great for clinical databases.)

Other in-hospital meetings would benefit from the access to documents and data entry on a laptop.

I also travel for lecturing and committee meetings. All of you road warriors know the organizing challenges that are inherent in that life.

GTD Applicability:
Weekly review-type reviews and identification of NAs are "huddle like" behaviors that are performed by high-performance teams dealing with stressful/chaotic situations. Taking time to stop and plan - if only for a few seconds - helps prevent miscommunications and wasted energy by improving situational awareness.


GTD applicability to patient care:
The methodology of separating processing from NA could help w/more effective distribution of workload to appropriate health care workers. The "waiting for" concept is starting to be applied in emerging clinical information systems as automated process exception errors.

Finally: The stress of patient care is sufficiently challenging, so if GTD helps achieve "stress-free productivity" with the non-patient care aspects of the job, it is most welcome.

Julian