The state of Maryland has jumped on the bandwagon for electronic health records - and they are asking their physicians to do the same. In fact, Governor Martin O’Malley just recently signed a bill intended to persuade doctors into using the electronic medical records. How? By requiring private health insurance companies to provide incentives for physicians who adopt the electronic records. According to the bill, insurers will have to provide some sort of financial motivation for adopting electronic health records. Insurers will be able to choose with incentive to provide: higher reimbursements, single-sum payments, or any in-kind service that has a monetary value. And according to the Baltimore Sun, doctors who do not utilize electronic health records by 2015 could even face penalties.

This new bill also requires the state to develop a health information exchange - a computer network that links all of Maryland’s physicians, hospitals, medical laboratories, and pharmacies. This type of health information exchange has been discussed before - both by former President George W. Bush, and current President Barack Obama. Ideally, they would have each state create a health information network, and then all the state networks would be linked together. This national health information exchange could be used to provide more quality health care, in a more patient-based environment.

Maryland’s health information network has actually been in the works since last summer, when the Maryland Health Care Commission asked two different physician groups to develop pilot programs for the network. These two groups encompass a wide variety of health care entities:

The Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients (CRISP)

• John Hopkins Medicine
• MedStar Health
• Erickson Retirement Communities
• And several other large Baltimore medical institutions

The Montgomery Country Health Information Exchange

• Community Hospitals
• County Health Department
• Health clinics that serve the poor and uninsured

One Maryland pilot projects currently link 10 community clinics with the Montgomery Country General Hospital emergency room. When a patient arrives at the ER, the physician can quickly access their medical history, including medications, allergies, lab results, and previous medical visits. The emergency room can then send information to the patient’s clinic, which might not otherwise know about the visit. Although this group doesn’t plan to bid on the statewide information exchange project, they hope that the pilot program will provide vital information for the statewide network.

The ultimate goal of both the Electronic Health Record system and the Health Information Network are quite simple: to bring individual patients’ data together in one place. Many people receive care from a wide variety of medical facilities, and those health records are often not combined. These new technologies would allow for improved access to patient data, improved patient safety, lower health care costs, and an overall enhanced patient experience.

I’ve done it before and I’m sure many of you have as well: decided I wanted to completely change my life, from diet to exercise to productivity habits to spending and career and family and more.

I’ve failed in the attempt to do this at least a few times.

I’ve also done it successfully. You might have ready my story, but basically I went from overweight, sedentary, heavily in debt, overworked and stressed, unproductive, with no time for my family … to a runner, marathoner, exerciser, healthy diet, vegetarian, early riser, much more productive, debt-free, simplified life where I have time for my wife and kids.

And how did I do it all? One little step at a time.

Recently reader Christine asked:

I really want to be a positive, achieving, dedicated, in-the-moment, fun (& all the good traits you can imagine!) woman/wife/mother. How can I become that in my lifetime?

I want to be completely healed from past hurts, mistakes, doubts, failures, disappointments, pains, etc. I want to be free!

In short, Mr. Leo, I WANT TO CHANGE MY LIFE.

Christine, you’ve asked a lot of me, and I honestly can’t tackle it all in one answer, so I won’t try. Instead, I will give you the best suggestion I have:

Start small.

Don’t try to make all these huge changes, and change your entire life at once. It’s too hard, and overwhelming. You can’t do everything at once — you can only do one thing at a time.

So pick one thing to change — something easy. Don’t pick the most difficult thing — just the easiest. Something you can focus on for the next couple of weeks.

Be sure you’re going to be successful at it — again, it should be super easy.

Then clear everything else off your plate and focus on just that. Really put all your energy into making that change. You might try something simple, like smile more, or to be more grateful (say a prayer of thanks in the morning, and show gratitude to people throughout the day), or focus on slowing down as you do your work or chores.

Start small, and be sure to make this a success. Once you’ve had that success, use that feeling of success to leverage a second success — something small that you can win at, again. Keep repeating this, small successes, one after the other.

Small steps. That’s how you’re going to change your life. You’ll probably get impatient and want to do more, but trust me: this will work.
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Read more about simple productivity, focus and getting great things done in Leo’s book, The Power of Less.

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I don’t think I could start a post like this one without saying that I’m not homeless in the usual sense of the word. I have now not a single debt in the world - no mortgage, no loans, no consumer debt, NOTHING - and I have a net worth in the mid-six-figures.  Yet I fit the definition because, for a week, my family has had no home.  Our home was sold and our lease on our new home has not yet begun, so we are - by a weak technical point - homeless.

I can’t say it’s enjoyable. I am fortunate to have parents with a home large enough to accomodate an additional four people without much strain, but it’s still an odd feeling.  I have been homeless twice in my adult life now.  Once, when I returned from Moscow in my mid-20s, and now.  When I returned from Moscow I was single and simply didn’t bother to get a separate place to live.  I had been overseas for a while and living with my parents for a month or two while I found a new job seemed like a vacation.  After selling our house in New Jersey, we were left with an awkward “gap time” between the pickup of our belongings by the moving company and delivery in Florida.  So, for a brief time, we are living off what could be stuffed into our minivan.

Again, we haven’t suffered. My parents and my brother’s family have spent a lot of time taking care of us, and in many senses it’s been a relief to finally put the house sale behind us.  Although I’ll miss our house (the house to which I brought my two children home from the hospital), I was relieved to sell it, collect the proceeds and move on.  Knowing that it was sold a few months ago gave me time to adjust and move on.  What I wasn’t prepared for was a sense of disorientation - being unemployed and without a “real” home for even a week gives me a sense of vertigo.

If you read much about the crisis we are enduring as a nation, you get a glimpse of the terror a lot of people must be facing. Worrying about paying the electric bill has never crossed my mind, but I can’t even begin to understand the terror a family must face if they can’t pay for heat in the winter.  For the first time in my life though, I have started to realize that I CAN understand that terror.  Not because I’m suffering - far from it, to be honest.  I just felt, for a second, the open, empty feeling of having no base.

I don’t think I can take much away from this episode other than sympathy. We have rented a nice house in a good neighborhood of a well-to-do town in a prosperous county in a … well, struggling state.  But Bubelah and I are fortunate to have parents who are supportive and helpful, so we’ve never felt hopeless.  I just wish - after a tiny dose of homelessness - that everybody was as lucky as we are.  Being homeless - even in a technical sense of the word - is a disturbing feeling, and I would never wish it on anyone.

photo credit: Glutnix

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Post from: brip blap.

on being homeless

I know that my boyfriend was extremely disappointed when he heard that Megan Fox turned down a role to play Wonder Woman. He, like many other men and women cannot seem to get enough of the bombshell. Now that I think about it, Wonder Woman was also one of the first women my bf fantasized about…but I digress…LOL (please don’t kill me dear)!

I would like to know what you think. Would you have cared to see Megan Fox play Wonder Woman? She was very clear when she told the UK Times Online in an interview that she thinks “Wonder Woman is a lame superhero.”

Personally, my first reaction was that Megan Fox was not curvy enough to play Wonder Woman…

I just realized that today is the one year anniversary of the Wii Fit video and had to post something before midnight. Happy Anniversary to me!

Total hits only on YouTube just shy of 8.5 million Man, who would have thunk that this silly video would have led to all these amazing opportunities!

Screenshot from Pownce conversation with @tannerpowell!

I have had the wonderful opportunity to share my experiences with everyone about EA SPORTS Active. I am dying to hear what you all think about it. To everyone that has twittered, emailed or facebooked me, please share pictures, comments, videos, whatever!

And remember, the nationwide challenge will begin June 1st. “All I want to know is, who’s coming with me?”

Article by Zen Habits contributor Jonathan Mead; follow him on twitter.

What would happen if we started being honest with ourselves about what we really want?

What if we started being ruthlessly real? What if we actually said the things that we think about, but are afraid to say?

Our egos may shrink and squirm, afraid to face reality as it is; afraid to bypass all the pretense; afraid to confront the shear nakedness of authenticity.

But maybe if we could evade the grip of our ego-based fears, we could embrace unfiltered, unmediated reality.

Maybe, just then, we’d start to come alive.

When I speak of open, authentic honesty, I mean being truly connected to your higher self. Not the ego-dominated self, but your spirit, (or whatever word you’d like to use, the word is not important). When you’re tuned into this source that is bigger than your puny ego, your living from a state of unadulterated awareness.

When you’re acting from this state, you’re not thinking about whether what you’re doing is right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate. You act completely naturally, unafraid to express yourself authentically and freely. You’re not afraid to tell someone how you really feel or ask for something you need. It’s from this place that you experience bliss, because there is no ego holding you back from it. There is no hesitation when the ego is not present.

So how do you get into this state of flow and uninhibited movement?

Here are the three simplest and most effective things you can to become more conscious, and in turn, more authentic.

• Practice mindfulness. This is the most important aspect of acting authentically. If you’re not being mindful, you lose awareness of your ability to determine whether you are acting reactively or if you are acting from your authentic Self. I have to admit, remaining in a position of persistent mindfulness is not an easy task. This is not something you will master in a day, a month or even a year. But you can practice, and the more you practice the more it will be easy to remain mindful. The way to practice mindfulness is to simply center your focus and attention on whatever you are presently doing or experiencing. Easy to describe, difficult to practice.
• Use reminders to help you stay mindful. There are a lot of mental triggers (or anchors, in NLP terms) you can create to prompt you to return to mindfulness. One great trigger is remembering to be mindful every time you see a red light at a stop light; or just every time you come to a stoplight, green, yellow or red. I have a bell on my bike that I ring when I’m riding to help remind me to be mindful. Another good and more permanent reminder is getting a tattoo somewhere you can easily see to make you mindful. If that’s not your thing, you could have a bracelet or ring that you’ve chosen as a sacred symbol to help remind you to be mindful.
• Practice daily meditation. There is no substitute for consistent, daily meditation in aiding your facility to remain present. The best thing about meditation is it also allows you time to actually listen to yourself. Most of the time, we’re constantly talking to ourselves and we never take the time to listen. During the practice of silent awareness, we have the opportunity to listen to our thoughts and feelings, and in doing so, we’ll be better equipped to remain mindful when we feel pulled into unconscious patterns. The most important thing to do is start small. Practice meditating for 5 or 10 minutes each day before you go to sleep or after you wake up. Don’t be hard on yourself if you feel your mind isn’t quieting fast enough, or if you think you’re not good at meditating. If you remain diligent, your mind will eventually get tired of listening to itself babble incessantly.

The more mindful we become, the more we increase our capacity for action that is stripped of pretense and duplicity.

When we’re completely authentic, we’re no longer afraid to speak and act in meaningful ways. We’re not afraid to tell someone how we truly feel. We don’t shirk when faced with the choice of either acting from integrity or slipping into cowardly ego-based decisions.

Maybe if we started saying the things we think but do not say, our lives would have more meaning.

I think then we could grasp what it means to really be free.

Maybe then we’d realize the true meaning of liberation.

This article was written by Zen Habits contributor Jonathan Mead of Illuminated Mind. To learn more about how to not ruin your life, grab a subscription to Illuminated Mind.
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Bloggers: Check out the awesome new 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook from Darren Rowse of Problogger. The link here is an affiliate link, fyi, but I really think this workbook will help any blogger (myself included) take their blog to the next level. Darren’s a great blogger, sincere guy, and really knows this topic. If you buy it and don’t like the workbook, email or Twitter me and I’ll personally give you your money back. - Leo

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Jerry Kolber, an award-winning writer, producer, and executive producer of film and television.

Along with my own deepening mindfulness meditation practice, I’ve found Leo’s writing to be extremely helpful in my ongoing discovery of why I am on this planet.

For the last decade, from my mid 20’s to my mid 30’s, I’ve been working in film and television as a writer, producer, and executive producer on shows like Inked, Confessions of a Matchmaker, NOFX: Backstage Passport, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Some of the television I’ve worked on has been aligned with my desire to help people overcome obstacles to manifesting their full potential as human beings – Queer Eye and Confessions of a Matchmaker in particular – while some of it has merely been great entertainment.  Along the way I’ve spent a lot of my spare time working on social justice media for places like Treehugger.com and working on environmental justice issues.

I’ve been taking active steps in the last year to manifest a life built more predominantly around my interest in social justice, particularly as it relates to food and the environment. I am constantly educating myself on issues around farming, local and organic food, and how our food choices affect the interdependent web that we all live in. As Leo has often said here, a delicious healthy diet is deeply satisfying and energizing, and once you start eating food that makes you feel alive in your core it’s hard to eat anything else.

Eating is basically the only time we voluntarily select which parts of the “outside world” we want to put inside us; the energy of the food has quite an impact on the quality of our energy and our thoughts. Yet the mainstream conversation about how to get and prepare healthy, fresh food focuses mainly on expensive organic luxury items, while conversations about eating on a budget too often focus on processed “cheap food.” Early this year I had an aha moment: I needed to take my avid interest in cooking, combine it with everything I knew about food justice, and write a fun, easily accessible cookbook so that people on a budget could join the “food revolution”.

The Power of Less to the Rescue

But I had a problem. When I decided to write this book in January I was in the middle of executive producing a pilot. I had four other projects floating around, plus friends I wanted to see, books I wanted to read, family to keep in touch with, and blogs to keep up with! Although everything going on was very satisfying and exciting, in my heart I heard a voice saying “write the cookbook” but I couldn’t figure out how to find the time. I’d been reading Leo’s blog for a while, and fortuitously right around this time he published The Power of Less which proved invaluable in helping me clarify how to get my book written and published. I found three ideas in Leo’s book that were particularly illuminating.

1. One Goal
The first of these is Leo’s advice to have only one “Big Goal” at a time. Leo’s idea of a “big goal” is something that is achievable but challenging, probably within about six months to a year. A big goal can be anything from, “get into law school”, to “become a published author”, to “finish a triathlon”. His feeling is that having one goal forces you to focus all your energy on achieving that goal, increasing your chances of completing it and reducing the diluted energy that results from the more typical advice of having several simultaneous goals.

I had never thought of it this way, but after trying the “One Big Goal” strategy I’m a believer. We live in a world of limitless possibility – and limitless distraction – so there’s already enough competing for the bandwidth of our attention without creating our own obstacles to success by having multiple goals. Using my own contemplative practice as well as Leo’s techniques from part one of the book, I arrived at my One Big Goal: “Make a living creating life-changing social justice media.” This goal sounds difficult, but I know it’s achievable because I can look around and see others who are doing it - and if they can do it, why not me?

2. Three Projects.
The next idea that proved invaluable was the advice to have only three projects at a time. Three projects? I had at least fifteen! Leo’s advice is to list your top three projects – three things that are big, game-changing, and can each be done in about a week or two – and add no new projects until all three of those are done. You’re likely going to have one work related project, and at least one related to your One Big Goal. I decided to give it a shot, listing my top three projects for the week of January 23 2009 as:

1. Finish rough cut of Sonya Fitzpatrick pilot (the Animal Planet show). (Work)
2. Setup website for cookbook at www.ThreeDollarDinner.com. (One Big Goal)
3. Finish editing pitch book for Mister Dance Pants (Work/Personal)

I don’t list exercising, meditating, or social life as “projects” – these are part of my daily routine.

3. Most Important Tasks.
The third piece of Leo’s advice that I found life-changing – and this one more so than any other - is to have three Most Important Tasks each day, to write them up the night before, and to do them first thing in the morning BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE. I lump all of these ideas under the heading “MIT” (Most Important Tasks) and can tell you that applying just this one concept will radically change the way you achieve success. He recommends that one of your MIT’s each day relate to your One Big Goal, one relate to work (if that is a different arena than your big goal) and one to your personal life. A good way to know if something qualifies as an MIT is to ask:  Will doing this task today make a profound difference in my life a week, a month, or a year from now?

Here are my three MIT’s from January 25, 2009:

1. Research different kinds of blogging software and pick one (One Big Goal)
2. Call Barry to review Mister Dancepants slides (Work/Personal)
3. Finish writing outline for act four of the Sonya Fitzpatrick rough cut (Work)

Since I’m already an “early riser” (another Leo habit) I tend to spend about two hours before the day really kicks into high gear doing my MIT’s; I also practice meditating during this time, as well as scanning a bunch of blogs and news items. If I wait until later I’m already busy with work, and after work I’m socializing or winding down. Already having an “early riser” habit in place has been very helpful. If I wasn’t already getting up early, it would be the first habit I would want to develop in pursuit of my big goals.

Each night I would list my next three MIT’s, the next morning I did them, and after about three weeks I’d finished those first three projects. I was so excited to finish the cookbook site and so impressed with this simple goal management system that I decided to focus almost exclusively on the cookbook and the website through March and April, taking on freelance writing clients for income through Guru.com. My project list throughout March and April was some version of:

1. Finish project for client (whatever writing project I had that week)
2. Edit cookbook (or take photos of food, or get graphics for website)
3. Write rough draft of personal manifesto for cookbook website

And a pretty typical list of three MITs each day read:

1. Write seven pages of client ebook
2. Edit ten pages of cookbook
3. Write copy for welcome and manifesto page of website

I knew that my cookbook would help people and go a long way towards my goal of “Make a living creating life-changing social justice media.” Because the cookbook is as much about “food justice” as it is the awesome recipes I’ve put together, it was impossible to not be on fire with passion for this One Big Goal.

A few other tools that deserve more than honorable mention. Jonathan Field’s book Career Renegade is a great guide to launching a self-generated career even in a “bad economy” and his free manifesto at www.CareerRenegade.com is fantastic. My contemplative practice – a daily session of sitting meditation, usually ten to twenty minutes – is critical to staying grounded and relevant, and is inspired by Ethan Nichtern and his book One City and the community at The Interdependence Project. I’m also a regular contributor to the One City Blog on Beliefnet.com, where every day I find great support and provocative conversation from others who are making Buddhist inspired meditation relevant to 21^st century life.

Results
Combining my own mindfulness practice with Leo’s very practical advice helped me go from concept to finished product in less than 10 weeks – including putting up a website, setting up an ebook delivery system, writing a 50 page book, and writing a 25 page free manifesto that I give away on the site – all while maintaining my “regular life.” You can see the results yourself at www.ThreeDollarDinner.com. I wouldn’t undertake any producing or writing project now without applying Leo’s methods.

Jerry Kolber is an award-winning writer, producer, and executive producer of film and television including Inked and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. He regularly enjoys www.ZenHabits.net and recently launched a site offering insights into eating great food on a budget at www.ThreeDollarDinner.com.

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Read more about simple productivity, focus and getting great things done in Leo’s book, The Power of Less.