Take another look at your application base’s strengths

One of the most common potential savings most medical systems have is in their already installed application base. Over and over organizations purchase application suites with a very limited purpose in mind. They very often completely overlook the added features many of these systems have. This leads them [...]

Refocus on performance improvement (process)

Clinical processes are some of the most complex processes in the world today. They may seem extremely daunting and even impossible to streamline. However, a savvy IT professional can save the organization a huge amount of money with only minimal effort. Process improvement has been fully ingrained in most industries for [...]

Bandwidth Management

WAN costs are always a large chunk of a CIO’s annual operating budget. WAN requirements will only get worse for hospitals and medical centers as we implement more technology. EMRs, PACS, tele-medicine, e-patient, and Medical Home will all take an every increasing amount of bandwidth. A huge consideration must be taken regarding how to [...]

Health care has long been an industry thought to be recession proof. In the recession of 2008+ we are finding that thought to be false. Charity care applications have risen substantially, overall volumes and service demands are dropping, elective surgeries and treatments are being put off.

I expect that IT leaders across the nation [...]

What do you think about the new ICD-10 codes?  What are your concerns?  What are your hopes?  Do you feel America is lagging behind Europe in this category?  What do you recommend?

Reliability -
When it comes to healthcare, the primary focus of any patient data is that the information is both available and accurate at all times. Some businesses can afford downtime, even for long periods, but when the data is patient related, the data involved could become critical or even vital. For this reason, in my [...]

Security
Even before the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was signed in 1996 the confidentiality of patient data had a high priority. Patient records were private and policies covering patient data restricted access to them to specific groups of people. But with technological advances such as The Internet, and public wireless network hardware being pushed in [...]

Versatility

The Versatility of a database is dependent on several factors; Scalability, Interoperability and Usability.
Client/Server databases, normally, can be scaled, that is, you can design your system to allow for extreme growth in the number of users, and the amount of data stored by the system.  Fifteen years ago Scalability was not a primary consideration of most databases.  In [...]