Medigy Logo The Healthcare IT Guy
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@ShahidNShah

How to get a job in healthcare IT when you don’t have specific experience

I get questions from students and career changers who want to enter the healthcare IT field routinely and I enjoy replying privately to help out where I can. One question I received a few days ago is especially common so I thought I’d provide an answer publicly: I am currently a student at [a healthcare IT training program]. This is a career change for me … my only medical experience is as a patient.

Shahid N. Shah

FDA’s new draft guidance on mobile apps and what it means to health IT vendors

The FDA released the (currently non-binding) “Draft Guidance for Industry and Food and Drug Administration Staff on Mobile Medical Applications” earlier this week. I knew many of my clients and readers would be asking about the ramifications of this new guidance so I read the document as soon as it came out. In general I was impressed by the FDA’s balanced approach to patient safety and their desire not to stifle competition; overall I thought they were not looking to overreach their purview and I think they succeeded (except for the part on clinical decision support, discussed further below).

Shahid N. Shah

How to teach Microsoft applications that “HER” is not the proper replacement for “EHR”

After the 4 thousandth time I’ve cursed Microsoft Outlook, Word, or Excel for “auto correcting” the acronym “EHR" to “HER” I finally took 30 seconds to fix this once and for all. I figured with 20 years of programming experience I should be able to figure it out 🙂 Here’s what you should do if you’re tired of having to change “HER” back to “EHR" in Microsoft Word, Excel, and other apps (I copied some of this from the Microsoft Help text):

Shahid N. Shah

Life Sciences venture investing dramatically outperformed Tech venture investing over the past decade

I read with great interest a study posted on TheBij.com which talks about venture investment returns in the healthcare field: Life Sciences: The Rodney Dangerfield of Venture Capital. I’ve been in the general IT as well as the specific healthcare IT world for many years but the study results managed to surprise me, specifically the following: A widely held notion … is that Life Sciences/ Healthcare (LS) venture investing is too challenging and has underperformed IT and Internet (Tech) investing over the past decade and will only continue to do so.

Shahid N. Shah

Why medical device data is the best way to fill meaningful use EHRs and conduct comparative effectiveness research (CER)

I will be presenting at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCon) in Portland at the end of the month. As an avid reader of dozens of O’Reilly’s technical books over the years I was excited when they reached out to ask if I would talk about open source in the healthcare world. While open source isn’t a major force in the healthcare IT ecosystem right now, that will be changing over the coming years and should be able to change the medical world in the same way that open source has improved enterprise IT and made the consumer web possible.

Shahid N. Shah

Guest Article: How to sell your EHR and other health IT products into clinics and physician practices

A frequent question I am asked by startups and new product development teams (especially those building EMRs / EHRs) is “what’s the best way to sell my EHR to doctors and clinics?” My friend Steve Carbonara has been selling software to practices for years so I asked him to write a companion to his piece on selling to hospitals. Steve currently heads Sales Force Effectiveness at Bard Medical and runs his own consulting practice helping companies with their sales process.

Shahid N. Shah

Report from NIST EHR Usability Forum: 5 Things EHR Vendors Should Do Right Now to Prepare for Meaningful Use Usability Criteria

_Last week I was invited to attend the second annual NIST forum for EHR Usability called “A Community-Building Workshop: Measuring, Evaluating and Improving the Usability of Electronic Health Records.” NIST, in collaboration with the ONC, unveiled its initial discussion points for what it might consider as the “Usability Criteria” in the upcoming Meaningful Use Stage 2 regulations. At the event I met with Dr. Melanie Rodney, Distinguished Researcher at Macadamian and a member of the HIMSS Usability task force; I was impressed by the work that she and her firm were doing in EHR usability space.

Shahid N. Shah

Transparent heath data and APIs are real, where were the med device vendors?

I was invited to attend the second annual Healthcare Data Initiative Forum at the NIH Institute of Medicine (IOM) and after spending most of the day today listening to the keynotes and panelists as well as acting as a judge for some of the app contests, I’m leaving impressed and full of hope for our little tech corner of the world. This “open data forum” or “data palooza” as it’s affectionately called was well attended — the gathering was kicked off by no less than Kathleen Sebelius (HHS Secretary), Francis Collins (NIH Director), and Todd Park (HHS CTO, who was energetic and terrific, as usual).

Shahid N. Shah
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