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@ShahidNShah

Opinion

A collection of 439  Posts

IT in the House

I was recently interviewed by For the Record magazine about why many hospitals and their CIOs are choosing to bring their IT projects inhouse. Here’s how Elizabeth Roop began the article: It may be too soon to call it a bona fide trend, but there is a change underway within some hospital IT departments, where they are bucking tradition and handling projects internally rather than outsourcing them to vendors or consultants.

Shahid N. Shah

Barriers to optimal use of Online Healthcare Apps

I’m a big proponent of software as a service (SaaS), application service providers (ASPs), and related “online application” technologies. Online applications make great sense in healthcare because of the network effect: they are inherently collaborative, they are designed for integration, and easy to install and begin using. However, we’ll have to solve the following problems before we can really call online apps a success in healthcare settings: Application availability offline — online apps are great but what happens if there’s downtime?

Shahid N. Shah

Recent postings at HIMSS Live! Blog

I’ve been having fun blogging about the upcoming HIMSS Conference in New Orleans over at HIMSS Live!, the official blog of the HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition. In case you’ve been busy doing real work instead of reading all those blog entries, here’s what you may have missed: Why Dr. Enoch Choi attends the Conference. What the Interoperability Showcase is all about. Some of the Symposia geared towards specific audiences.

Shahid N. Shah

Guest Article: Comparison shopping for healthcare

I recently learned about Vimo and they intrigued me because they look to be the Lending Tree of healthcare and offer comparison shopping for surgical procedures, insurance, doctors, health savings accounts, and hospitals. They claim to even be able to help consumers negotiate down medical bills they already received. Vimo seems to be a company worth watching because if they can achieve even part of what they plan it could make a direct impact to healthcare consumers.

Shahid N. Shah

Open source software for clinical research

A number of my readers have asked me about open source software for clinical research; I recommend taking a look at OpenClinica. From their introduction: It facilitates protocol configuration, design of case report forms, electronic data capture, retrieval, and management. OpenClinica supports HIPAA guidelines, and is designed as a standards-based extensible, modular, and open source platform. It has all the right buzz-words: it’s web-based, written using Java, and is pretty simple to use.

Shahid N. Shah

Do micro-job sites offer better jobs?

There’s recently been a steady uptick in new micro-job sites that eschew the “single site fits all” strategy pioneered by Monster.com. Basically, the new niche-oriented sites focus on specific jobs of very specific markets. Well, I bring this up because I ran across Med IT Jobs which is focused on, you guessed it, healthcare IT and medical informatics jobs. While it’s pretty small and doesn’t represent many companies yet, it’s free for a limited time so it’s worth giving it a shot if you’re looking for a job or if you’re an employer with an open position.

Shahid N. Shah

Disaster and Emergency Response Systems

All hospitals must have disaster and emergency response systems in place. FEMA’s National Incidence Management System (NIMS) is something that all of us need to be aware of and be able to obtain alerts from and provide information to. I ran across FastCommand, a system which implements the NIMS recommendations, and thought it might be something useful if you don’t have automated systems in place. It has one of my favorite attributes: it’s a web-based solution.

Shahid N. Shah

AMIA’s Report on the Secondary use of Healthcare Data

One of my readers, Tim McLung, did me a huge favor recently by answering a question I posed in my recent post Who Owns Your Data? I asked if anyone had seen some work done in this area about data ownership and Tim left a comment pointing to the recently completed report from AMIA entitled “Toward a National Framework for the Secondary Use of Health Data“. Thanks, Tim. The document doesn’t answer all my questions but it’s a pretty good start because there are numerous recommendations.

Shahid N. Shah

HIMSS07 Conference Blog Launched

This summer I wrote about HIMSS’ interest in bloggers and blogging and I got a number of positive comments indicating that we’d all be happy to see HIMSS join the Blogosphere. Well, HIMSS has launched their first blog, centered around the 2007 HIMSS Annual Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans. Available at www.HIMSSLive.com, the blog is designed to provide the most current information about the conference along with related healthcare IT news.

Shahid N. Shah

Minimizing impacts of change

We all know that an IT organization’s effectiveness is significantly impacted by change. Be it an installation of new hardware, replacement of networking devices, or deployment of software upgrades, change is good; however, everytime something changes there’s a chance for failure because something that worked before may suddenly stop working. Change management strategy is so important that there should be people who are in charge of it in your organization (usually a configuration manager).

Shahid N. Shah
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