Decision Makers Hub | HR & Enterprise Tech Insights for People Leaders

Unlimited paid time off was supposed to be a win-win: employees get flexibility, companies shed a balance sheet liability, and everyone moves past the archaic "use it or lose it" anxiety that defined mid-century employment. Between 2015 and 2022, adoption of unlimited PTO policies among U.S. companies with more than 100 employees roughly tripled, driven by a wave of tech-sector signaling that spread quickly into financial services, consulting, and healthcare administration. The data that has since emerged is less flattering. Employees under unlimited PTO policies take, on average, two to three fewer days off per year than their counterparts with defined accrual banks. Burnout rates rise measurably in the 18-to-24-month window after a company switches. Discrimination exposure increases. And in California, Colorado, and a growing list of other states, the policy may not even achieve its intended legal effect at termination. This is not a policy failure that gets press. Co...

Decision Makers Hub Patient safety programs invest heavily in medication protocols, surgical checklists, and infection control — and then rest all of it on an assumption that fails more often than anyone likes to admit: that the right record belongs to the patient in front of you. Correct patient identification is the foundation the rest of safety stands on. Here are five specific ways getting identification right prevents harm. 1. It Prevents Wrong-Patient Medication Errors The most direct safety link. When a medication order attaches to the wrong record, or a nurse administers to the wrong patient, the result can be immediate harm. Reliable identification at the point of care — matching the patient to the record before the drug, not after — is the single control that closes the largest category of preventable medication events. Barcode and biometric verification at the bedside exist precisely because spoken-name confirmation fails under noise, fatigue, and language barriers. 2...

Decision Makers Hub Ask a hospital's risk officer what keeps them up at night and patient misidentification will be near the top — not because it happens constantly, but because when it does, the consequences are severe: wrong-patient medication, duplicate or overlaid records, denied claims, and in the worst cases, harm. A dedicated patient identification platform exists to close that gap. Here is what these systems actually address and why the problem has proven so stubborn. Why Patient Identification Is So Hard The difficulty is structural. Hospitals run multiple systems — EHR, registration, lab, radiology, billing — that must agree on who a patient is. Names are duplicated, misspelled, and change with marriage; dates of birth are mistyped; two patients share the same name and birthday. The result is the industry's quiet epidemic: duplicate records (the same patient existing as several records) and overlays (two patients merged into one record). Both corrupt the clini...

Decision Makers Hub Healthcare organizations — and any business handling health information with a physical workforce — live under two compliance regimes at once: HIPAA governing protected health information, and OSHA governing workplace safety. They are enforced by different agencies, audited on different rhythms, and violated in different ways, but the path to sustainable compliance with both runs through the same discipline: know your obligations, assess your gaps, fix by priority, document everything, and assign owners. Here is that path, laid end to end. Step One: Scope Your Actual Obligations For HIPAA, determine whether you are a covered entity (providers, plans, clearinghouses) or a business associate handling PHI for one — the Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules follow from that status. For OSHA, identify the standards your operations trigger: bloodborne pathogens for anyone with exposure risk, hazard communication for chemical use, plus the general-industry...

Decision Makers Hub Search for Epic's hardware requirements and you will find surprisingly little official documentation — because Epic distributes its specifications to customer organizations, not to the public. That leaves two groups guessing: clinicians trying to figure out whether their home machine can handle remote charting, and IT teams sizing workstation refreshes for an Epic go-live. Here is what actually matters, based on how Epic is deployed in practice. How Epic Actually Runs on Your Machine The first thing to understand is that "running Epic" almost never means running the database on your device. Epic's client — historically Hyperspace, now its successor Hyperdrive — is delivered one of three ways: installed locally on a managed workstation, streamed through virtualization platforms like Citrix or VMware Horizon, or accessed through a hospital-provided virtual desktop. Which delivery model your organization uses matters more than any single spec, b...

Healthcare IT leaders are caught between two pressures that don't naturally resolve. On one side: clinical operations, administrative departments, and business units that need internal tools faster than the traditional development cycle can deliver. Scheduling applications, patient communication workflows, compliance reporting dashboards, care coordination tools — the demand for internal software in healthcare organizations has never been higher, and the clinical and operational teams requesting it don't have much patience for long development timelines. On the other side: HIPAA. Specifically, the parts of HIPAA that apply to any software development process that touches protected health information — and in a healthcare organization, most internal apps eventually do. Those two pressures don't have to be in direct conflict. But they are in direct conflict at a lot of healthcare organizations right now, because the tools available to development teams have outpaced the...