(Editor's note: This guest blog was written by Matthew T. Patton, editor of ADVANCE for Medical Laboratory Professionals.) Endless nights of pouring through magazines and newspapers and clicking seemingly endlessly through career sites to land a job is no kind of fun at all. In fact, looking for a job is a job in and of itself. No fun. If you're ...

Let me preface this by saying, April Fool's! Yeah, it ruins the fun, but it also saves me the guilt if someone were to actually use the tips below. If you're looking for serious advice, check out ''HITECH's Highway to Hell'' for cautionary words about electronic health record implementation. But before you do, read on for some foolhardy ...

I tend to watch the Super Bowl for the ads, so it's no surprise that while tuning in to the 2010 Olympics this weekend, a clever commercial caught my eye. GE Healthcare ran this ad about electronic health records (EHRs), showing how the technology connects physicians and improves coordination of care. The commercial starts in what appears to be ...

Remember those reading comprehension tests in middle school? You'd plow through a passage and then answer questions about the plot. Q: ''Why couldn't the Smiths leave for vacation?'' A: ''They couldn't find Buddy the dog.'' If only life could still be so simple. As adults, we're faced with form after form of archaic language and indecipherable ...

We got inside your heads. Not in any creepy subconscious sort of way; more like, ''Hey, you read our magazine, we see you at conferences-let's get to know each other.'' Three rounds of surveys later, we have a better idea of ''What Makes HIM Professionals Tick.'' I was pleased that 60 percent of you recycle, jealous that more than half of you ...

Yesterday, I read the Nov. 23 article on HISTalk about a multi-group practice that went electronic, and then turned its defunct chart storage room into useful office space. The ''before and after'' photos were particularly striking. Pre-scanning, the room is lined with overflowing shelves; post-scanning, it's a cavernous space with a ...

Greetings! My name is Rob Senior, and I am the newest member of the editorial staff at ADVANCE for Health Information Professionals. For the past eight years, I've worked at ADVANCE in a similar role for the Physical Therapists and PTAs magazine. In my new assignment, I'm learning about the ''other'' side of health care--the people developing, ...

Pst. How's your salary looking? Did you finally get that raise, or is your facility paying like it's 1999? Our National HIM Salary Survey is back to help gauge your weight on the payment scale.   With the rough-and-tumble economy, we're curious to see how the HIM sector panned out. Did budget cuts lead to an overall slash in work hours? Have ...

I'm what you might call ''doctor phobic.'' I haven't had a check up since 2001, and that was required to get into college. After high school, I moved to the Philadelphia suburbs from quiet nook upstate in a rural area lovingly referred to as the ''Polish Poconos.'' Where I grew up, you knew your doctors. We had one doctor who took care of my mom's ...

I was tickled that 500 of you took the time to fill out our fun, brief survey on ''What Makes HIM Professionals Tick?'' A second installment is currently posted on our Web site, and I hope the response is as good for that one. Thanks to everyone who took the time to fill it out! Based on the findings, we can conclude the following: You're busy ...