Hey Everyone!

Before I continue with our “regular programming” next week, I’d like to take a moment to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Telehealth Tuesday. 5 years ago, on Tuesday, October 8, 2019 I sent out the first Telehealth Tuesday to about 30 subscribers that I had met at a couple of conferences that fall.

Now there are about 1,000 reads a week of my weekly article across my mailing list and LinkedIn subscribers. I’m grateful for the positive feedback I’ve received over the years including some that have approached me in person, sharing their appreciation for the insights I’ve shared over the years.
 
Thank you readers!
The Genesis of Telehealth Tuesday
When I started my consulting firm in 2012, I joined a community of fellow consultants around Alan Weiss: first through a mentor, later through attendance of events and engaging with fellow consultants.
 
It was clear back then that the most successful consultants had a regular newsletter through which they stayed in touch with their clients, leads, prospects, and peers.
 
Over the first years in business I started a number of times to at least write some brief blog posts (or LinkedIn articles at the time), but in 5 years from 2014 to 2019 I only managed to publish 9 of them. Nothing seemed to stick.
 
But over the summer, based on some talks given by other consultants about their own process, a system began to take shape in my head that may just enable me to keep writing.
 
One key insight was to create myself some public accountability that would force me to publish it regularly on a set day of the week. Thus Telehealth “Tuesday” was not just an alluring alliteration, it was also the “program”.
 
Secondly, I need a way to make it personal. If you are reading this on LinkedIn or my blog, you will have missed out on what I include in every newsletter that goes out my mailing list: A personal editorial before the article where I chat a little bit more about that week’s article and also share opportunities to catch me virtually (in a public webinar) or in person (as I’m presenting or attending events).
 
As a highly extroverted individual, it was always important for me to envision having a conversation with my imagined audience.
 
Thirdly, I had to make the layout and style visually appealing. From the first Telehealth Tuesday article (which, in some aspects, today makes me cringe) on I had the title of the article embedded and, for the most part, used real photographs as the backdrop for my cover image (that majority of which I hand selected).
 
The fourth input into how Telehealth Tuesday came to be what it is, was the advice by numerous fellow consultants to reuse the content in multiple ways.
 
Given these multiple requirements, what was called for was a systematic process.
The Process of Telehealth Tuesday

vizIPility Service used for Telehealth Tuesday

All things came together in the fall of 2019 when I hired a freelance assistant, Aubrey. Over a few weeks we worked on devising a process that would have me focus on writing the article — and her focusing on getting my article out to my newsletter subscribers, onto my blog, published on LinkedIn and promoted via LinkedIn and Twitter. The above diagram showcases how we are still distributing and re-using Telehealth Tuesday content today.

Knowing myself, I knew that I could only write a weekly article “just in time” when “under the gun”. The choice of “Telehealth Tuesday” thus dictated I finish the article on Monday for publication on Tuesday. I did hold “romantic notions” about my possible ability to write over the weekend, but that only happened once or twice in the past 5 years.

One helpful aspect was that Aubrey is located in the Philippines — with a time difference of 12-13 hours being of great advantage, essentially pushing my deadline out to late Monday night (it is 10:10 pm as I write this paragraph).

And that has been our process more or less unchanged since 2019: I write my article and Aubrey drafts it in LinkedIn first, then sends me a draft version of the newsletter for review, before I turn in for the night.

As one of my favorite sayings goes: “Every system is perfectly designed, to get the results it gets”. What enabled me to turn in an article week after week was a systematic process that focused on the elements that I enjoyed (the creative writing), provided public accountability (I had someone waiting for me to work on it) and took away the more mundane, tedious tasks.

It also shortened the time I had to invest in publishing the article, as my work was done after writing the article.

267 articles

The Topics of Telehealth Tuesday

In the first years, most of my ideas for topics for Telehealth Tuesday simply come from paying attention to the conversations I’m having with our clients or our team, the posts or articles I’m reading, and by imagining what kind of conversation I’d like to have a specific person, such as the CEO of a rural health center.

During the Covid-19 health crisis I of course wrote about my experience of standing up primary care telehealth for an FQHC in 36 hours, shared a checklist for getting ready for “remote care”, and shared my insights about the “brave new world” of “hybrid care delivery”.

Over the weeks, and months my library of articles grew and certain themes emerged that we first converted into a number of whitepapers. Next, we started assembling articles into collections across three major themes:

Digital Health Guidance

Leading Telehealth

Optimizing Telehealth

Nowadays many of my articles are either pre-cursors to presentations I’m preparing for (like the one I’m giving at Telehealth T-Time this month on “Preparing for the rAIvolution”) or they describe some concepts of our consulting approach that I’m sharing in more depth with my team (such as my current series on vendor selection).

What’s Next?

Writing Telehealth Tuesday every week has definitely been “a labor of love” and I’ve learned a lot of surprising things in the process.

One strong benefit of Telehealth Tuesday that I did not anticipate is that writing my articles (most of them being 1,000 to 1,500 words long) I was able to articulate my thoughts and ideas more clearly.

About 6 weeks into the process, I was complaining to myself that based on my identity back then (an non-native English speaking engineer) I really had no business writing a newsletter. But then I had an epiphany! I simply declared myself as a writer. “I am a writer”, I said to myself — finding evidence in many well-crafted emails. With that change in identity, writing definitely became much, much easier.

Given my busy schedule during the day and family commitments over the weekend, I’ve been writing Telehealth Tuesday “on borrowed time” on Monday nights. If I’m being honest, there have been quite a few nights when I wish I didn’t “have” to write Telehealth Tuesday.

So in the future, I may start to recruit some guest writers from team Ingenium or my extended network, which would greatly reduce the time I’d have to spend on getting a Telehealth Tuesday “out the door”.

But for the time being, Telehealth Tuesday will continue. Maybe not for another 5 years, but definitely as long as the occasional feedback from readers proves that the information I’m sharing is of value.

Because ultimately that was the motivation for Telehealth Tuesday all along: To share what I know about telehealth and digital health in the hopes that it may help others to take advantage of these technologies to enable their clinicians to delivery extraordinary care.

If you are not a subscriber yet, you can subscribe to the email newsletter and/or the LinkedIn version. If there’s any topic you’d like to write about, simply reach out to me and I’ll most likely publish it within a few weeks.

To receive articles like these in your Inbox every week, you can subscribe to Christian’s Telehealth Tuesday Newsletter.

Subscribe to Telehealth Tuesday

Christian Milaster and his team optimize Telehealth Services for health systems and physician practices. Christian is the Founder and President of Ingenium Digital Health Advisors where he and his expert consortium partner with healthcare leaders to enable the delivery of extraordinary care.

Contact Christian by phone or text at 657-464-3648, via email, or video chat.

Connect with Christian