They’re on the minds of a few people around work lately. We’ve got some pretty significant changes coming over the horizon, many having to do with a multi-year rollout of an EMR system.
EMRs are basically there to store patient records digitally rather than on paper. This is a stupefyingly obvious concept, and it might be shocking to realize that a lot of med professionals don’t use EMRs at all, particularly those in rural areas.
The reason is because of HIPAA. The law makes it plain that any disclosure of privileged medical information to anyone not needing it will result in censure, fines, firing, facility decertification, the violation of Brownie Scouts by Satanic biker gangs, and Earth falling into the sun.
Since there are always security concerns, particularly dealing with digitally-stored and network-accessible data, there’s a lot of resistance to adopting the systems.
Anyway, the security group, communications group, systems group, etc. each want their own logos to internally brand their work, which does make sense in a facility that covers a fairly wide county, deals with about 130 or so physicians, and ten times that number of employees. The trick is to do up a design that actually meets those goals.
That’s a work in progress, though. More recently, I cranked out a design for a surgical practice with the initials MSS. The physician in charge there asked for a caduceus — hardly surprising — but one that incorporated the “MSS” into the design.
The thing about a logo is that it really needs to be a recognizable symbol, something that conveys a concept while at the same time branding a product or service. The term logo itself is rooted in the Greek for word, or possibly word-image. So even while it might not contain text, a logo has to convey something that could be put across in words as well.
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