Medigy Logo The Healthcare IT Guy
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@ShahidNShah

Engineering

A collection of 19  Posts

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

How do you decide which features to add to your software?

Given the well-warranted focus on design these days it’s always difficult to find the right balance between features that we should add to our software and those that we leave out. I was running a class recently on how to build product roadmaps for health IT apps / medical device software and the question of how we should decide which features to add came up. Here’s are just a few of the facets I talked about during that lecture:

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

Guest Article: Top 5 PACS interconnectivity and interoperability issues and their solutions

Most health IT interoperability and connectivity discussions these days center around HL7, CCD, and other structured data interchange. However, the vast majority of data (in terms of size) is shared as images and documents. The DICOM and PACS standards are very successful but given the number of questions I get about them from readers it seems there’s still a lot of guidance and support needed. To help answer some of the most common technical questions, I reached out to a fellow health IT expert, Herman Oosterwijk from OTech.

Shahid N. Shah

How to design next-generation EHR data models

Today’s reality of patient management is “disjointed care” and most of the collaborators in a patient’s care team don’t know what each other is doing for the patient in real time. Knowing all the different participants in the patient’s care team (providers, payers, family members, etc.) and coordinating and integrating their electronic activities is what successful EHRs must handle with ease as they look to graduate from basic retrospective documentation systems to modern patient collaboration platforms.

Shahid N. Shah

Guest Article: Techniques for matching patient record data across disparate EHRs and other systems

Some of the most frequent questions I receive these days surround data interoperability and integrating multiple health IT systems. One of the biggest problems in connectivity is matching patient record data and ensuring that the same patient data in different systems is linked properly. Given how many times this topic comes up, I reached out to Cameron Thompson, Acxiom Healthcare Group Managing Director. Acxiom has an interesting method of patient data matching, called persistent links, and when I saw what they were doing for matching consumer records in non-healthcare settings (e.

Shahid N. Shah

Join me for my EHR usability webinar on November 30 at 1:00p

I met researchers from Macadamian, a global UI design and innovation studio that has been doing some great work in the health IT usability space, at the recent EHR Usability Symposium held at NIST a couple of months ago. I was immediately impressed by their work so when they asked me to work with them on presenting NIST’s new Usability Criteria for Health IT and EHR Software document, I welcomed the opportunity.

Shahid N. Shah

Regulatory compliance officers need not fear open source software in medical devices or mission-critical healthcare IT systems

I spent the past few days in Boston at the Harvard Medical School Conference Center speaking audiences at the Medical Device Connectivity Conference (I presented lectures on how to design next-generation medical devices and gateways). Many people that attended my lectures showed a great deal of trepidation when I brought up the fact that they should use open source software (OSS) to reduce cost and potentially increase the quality of their devices; the most common excuse I heard was that the regulatory compliance folks wouldn’t allow OSS or that the FDA would disapprove.

Shahid N. Shah
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