Thanks!

The goji were from Baker Creek seeds this year, but next year it’ll be from cuttings. I thought I killed all the goji I got as cuttings last year, but one was just hiding under the chicory. Cuttings apparently start fruiting a year or two faster, and I’ll need to hack it back in the Winter anyway, so win-win.

Chard is totally underrated, both as food and an ornamental. I grow red chard, and in the late fall it turns the most unearthly dark-green/purple with glowing red veins. I keep the pink chard towards the front of the garden because it looks like someone’s goofing around with the saturation, but in real life. I also grow white chard (Lucullus) for eating, and last year the leaves were delicious the whole Summer here in the high desert and literally the size of my five year old. Like, the entire kid. In the Winter some of the outer leaves die off, but the bulk survives, so it’s great for visual interest in the front yard during the cold months. Big fan of chard

I lined my disused enclosed chicken run with compost, mulched it with burlap, and planted the whole inside perimeter with a bunch of varieties of pole beans hoping that they’ll grow to the sloped roof and hang down for easy harvest. They’re just starting to grab onto the walls now. I also shook a large packet of bunching onions around the perimeter. No idea how any of this will turn out, but I’m hoping it’ll get completely overgrown, turn into a cave, and be a fun place to hang out in with the kiddo when the heat gets (more) extreme.

Related adventure: this year I grew about a hundred and fifty extra seedlings to give away in front of the house, and they’re almost all gone after half a week. I thought about it for the last few years and finally decided to just do it. Lessons learned: cherry/pear tomatoes were unsurprisingly popular, and I overestimated how many people like eggplant. Next year I need to grow way more culinary herbs and novelties like roselle, ground cherries, artichokes, and goji–those all disappeared fast. I also put out seeds: everyone loves sunflowers and tithonia, but literally no one wanted to grow chard.

Finally something I’m actually qualified to weigh in on! I’m the lead UI developer for an EHR software (not saying which one or getting into details–it’d be pretty easy to figure out my identity).

First, to be fair, it’s possible that the software they’re using is genuinely terrible. They don’t say which EHR. I’ve heard this kind of thing from providers before, though, and it’s usually that they don’t know how to use the software. From the way the article describes the provider, it sounds like they’re stuck in paper and don’t want to learn a new way of doing things. On the one hand, fair enough–patient care should be their primary concern. On the other hand, patient care is so much easier, faster, and more accurate in an EHR.

In my EHR you select a patient and can get a full visit summary on any visit the patient has ever had with a couple of mouse clicks. Immunizations, clinical notes, radiology, goals, problems, vitals, education–everything that happened during the visit. There are built-in tools for reminders that automatically notify you of things that are important for the visit based on previous visits, contraindication checks for medications, tracking of fluid balance, integrated documentation for clinical reference and distributing to patients, etc, etc.

That’s not even to mention things like compliance for clinical quality measure reporting, integrating with state immunization registries, easy export of data to external facilities (eg, CCDA), using digital signatures for non-repudiation of controlled substance prescriptions, automagically pinging requests and data around to the different departments, etc. So many things that used to rely on a human squinting at a paper now just happen, with a built-in audit trail.

As for billing: we (developers, testers, and project/product managers) HATE billing. It’s a necessary evil, but we package it off as a separate plugin. It can pull procedure codes and the like from the database to do its job, but to suggest that billing is the only reason to use an electronic health record is astoundingly ignorant. Patient care is the primary concern of everyone who actually has hands on the application. Most of us are former providers who just happen to be alright at coding.

The author explicitly says that they didn’t tamper with headers or user agent. I’m neutral/not knowledgeable on the rest of your comment, but wanted to clarify that point.