What Scares Me

Happy Halloween or Blessed Samhain, whichever you prefer.  In light of the holiday (or perhaps in dark of it), I thought I'd make a list of the things that keep me awake at night:

1. The increasing pace of technology advancement in Healthcare IT.  What scares me here is that there are lot of very interesting things going on, too many in fact to keep track of them all.  There are two dangers: 
1. I'll miss something important that I should be paying attention to, and as a result, something might be selected that either isn't the best way to solve a problem, or doesn't fit well with other efforts.
2. More scary than the first, is that something will get rushed through that is broken, and as a result, harm occurs to people.  I don't know which would be worse, a case where I identified the issue and it got pushed through anyway, or a case where I didn't find the issue.
2. My provider (or my kid's provider) won't get a portal this year or next.  There's a slim chance of that for my provider, perhaps a slightly larger chance with regard to my kids' pediatrician, but it does concern me.  There's precious little I can do about this other than to keep hammering my providers (which I do at every opportunity).
3. Nobody will adopt standards that I want to work on, like Query Health, HQMF, ABBI.  Given that Query Health is in pilots, HQMF v1 is being used to delivery Meaningful Use measures, and HQMF v2 is easier to use, and ABBI PULL seems to have interest, it's just a matter of ensuring that I can put the time in on these to bring them to successful completion.
4. C-CDA Harmonization with the IHE PCC TF will be more difficult than I thought.  That's pretty likely, but I've already accounted for it in my plans for next year.  It's going to require more attention to code and tools rather than manual efforts, which means that I'll probably be pulling a bigger load on that than I would like with respect to execution.  The key to managing this one is delegating more non-coding efforts to others.