Engineering

As healthcare moves from on-premise to cloud services, the evaluation and selection of “HIPAA compliant” cloud service providers becomes an import task. I don’t like the description “HIPAA compliant” because it’s imprecise and not meaningful. However, it’s something that many non-technical people look for when evaluating providers so I’m using it here. My friend Alex Ginzburg, VP of Technology at Intervention Insights, and I have done this kind of healthcare cloud services providers evaluation and selection many times so it was natural for me to reach out and ask him to provide some guidance for the community. ...

The Fred Alger Management team reached out to me recently asking what innovative changes I thought the medical and healthcare industry will be going through over the next 50 years. It was for their innovative “Think Further” series: [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOgt85cPU8Q&list=UUcpr1hudOhiPOsj-7rwe8Ew&w=520] As Yogi Berra famously quipped “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future” but Alger’s “Future of Medicine” question is an interesting approach to generating ideas so I thought I’d give it a shot. ...

These days it’s pretty easy to build almost any kind of software you can imagine — what’s really hard, though, is figuring out what to build. As I work on complex software systems in government, medical devices, healthcare IT, and biomedical IT I find that tackling vague requirements is one of the most pervasive and difficult problems to solve. Even the most experienced developers have a hard time building something that has not been defined well for them; a disciplined software requirements engineering approach is necessary, especially in safety critical systems. ...

Our vision of providing a series of packed one day events focused on practical, relevant, and actionable health IT advice were very well received in Houston, NYC, and Santa Monica earlier this year. Our next event is in Chicago and we’re going to continue to eschew canned PowerPoint decks which limit conversations and instead deliver on the implications of major trends and operationalizable advice about where to successfully apply IT in healthcare settings. ...

As I’ve been preparing to chair the HealthIMPACT conference in Houston next Thursday I’ve been having some terrific conversations with big companies like Cisco, some of our publishing partners, and smaller vendors entering the health IT space for the first time. One great question I was asked during a discussing yesterday by a tech publisher was “so what’s it going to take to achieve real interoperability in healthcare and how long will it take? ...

This year I’m chairing a healthcare IT event series called HealthIMPACT — it’s what I’m hoping will be some of the best places for healthcare technology enthusiasts and buyers to get actionable advice on what’s real, what’s BS, what to buy, what not to buy, and perhaps most importantly, which guidance is worth following. In order to make sure we cover the right topics, we have created a very short survey so that we have some evidence-driven approaches to proving we’re focusing on the right areas. ...