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@ShahidNShah

Cloud Computing

A collection of 14  Posts

Evaluating and choosing healthcare cloud services providers

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.

Shahid N. Shah

Learn how to operationalize new health IT wisdom at HealthIMPACT Midwest in Chicago on September 8

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.

Shahid N. Shah

Guest Article: OLAP remains a great healthcare analytics architecture, even in the Big Data era

I’ve been getting many questions these days about big data tools and solutions, especially their role in healthcare analytics. I think that unless you’re doing large scale analysis of biomedical data such as genomics, it’s probably best to stick with traditional tried and true analytics tools. Online Analytics Processing (OLAP) can be invaluable for medical facilities to use when interpreting data and health informatics because most of that data is in relational, key-value, or hiearchical databases (such as MUMPS).

Shahid N. Shah

What EHR/PM vendors should do as 63% of buyers look to replace existing PM solutions

Melissa McCormack, a medical researcher with EHR consultancy group Software Advice, recently published their medical practice management BuyerView research, which found that 63% of the buyers were replacing existing PM solutions, rather than making a first-time purchase. This mirrors the trend we’ve seen across medical software purchasing, where the HITECH Act may have prompted hasty first purchases of EHR solutions, followed by replacements 1-2 years later. For PM vendors, this means there’s a huge opportunity to market your products to practices as an upgrade, even if they’re already using PM software.

Shahid N. Shah

Guest Article: HL7 FAQ and why exchanging critical patient data isn’t a nightmare

I recently saw a demo of the Decisions.com platform and left impressed with the workflow engine, business rules execution, forms automation, and data integration platform. I’m very familiar with almost all the major HL7 routers and integration engines out there but Carl Hewitt, Founder and Chief Architect at Decisions, is releasing something fairly unique — an visual HL7 interface definition and integration platform for use by analysts and non-technical personnel charged with healthcare data connectivity across business workflows.

Shahid N. Shah

Help us make sure HealthIMPACT events are useful and actionable

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.

Shahid N. Shah

Reducing Shadow IT in healthcare by embracing “good enough for HIPAA” business-friendly SaaS tools

I’ve said repeatedly that any cloud / SaaS vendor that wants to be taken seriously in healthcare must be willing to sign a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) and I was happy to hear that Box.com is now willing to do so. I’m quite pleased that we’re finally seeing some serious healthcare SaaS offerings from horizontal (non-healthcare-specific) vendors. Only when we move beyond healthcare-specific offerings will we be able to unshackle ourselves from the decades old legacy health IT vendors and that’s great news.

Shahid N. Shah

Protect yourself from Shadow IT, embrace “good enough for HIPAA” secure cloud services like Box and Skydrive

It’s a common misconception that if executives at hospitals or practices don’t have time to deliver sophisticated IT solutions to their users that users will just wait patiently and hope that solutions will arrive someday. However, there is a larger Shadow IT movement in many clinical settings than senior executives are willing to admit. Given the wealth of cloud offerings available, many of which have better security in the cloud than some on-premises “clinical” solutions, Shadow IT is growing and will cause more problems in the future as we try to reign it in.

Shahid N. Shah

Essentials of telehealth and telemedicine, top Do’s and Don’ts, mHealth and other health IT advice

I recently participated in a wonderful 55 minute video interview conducted by Nirav Desai for his_ **Hands On TeleHealth Interview **show_. I wanted to thank Nirav for leading an insightful discussion; you can watch the video on Nirav’s site but I wanted to capture the essence of the interview in the transcription below. Nirav: What are the essentials of Telehealth and Telemedicine? Shahid: Telehealth and Telemedicine are about extending health care from physical institutions, where it has most recently resided, to where the patients can receive care at home or other more convenient locations.

Shahid N. Shah

Guest Article: 8 Mistakes to Avoid when Securing Cloud Services

There’s solid demand these days for services like DropBox.com or Box.net that allow easy but secure file sharing to occur with proper privacy restrictions and audit tracking. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there are a few companies, such as FolderGrid, trying to solve the problem of HIPAA-compliant file sharing. What FolderGrid is doing, though, is quite unique in healthcare – creating infrastructure software for other health IT developers to build on top of.

Shahid N. Shah
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