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How To Write Unmaintainable Code

Roedy Green published a great article on something most of us in health IT deal with regularly: code that’s difficult to manage and maintain. He says you can ensure a job for life if you learn How To Write Unmaintainable Code. From his introduction: In the interests of creating employment opportunities in the Java programming field, I am passing on these tips from the masters on how to write code that is so difficult to maintain, that the people who come after you will take years to make even the simplest changes.

Shahid N. Shah

Federal Chief Architects Forum establishes Health Information Technology Ontology Project (HITOP) Work Group

From the HITOP mission statement introduction: The Health Information Technology Ontology Project (HITOP) Work Group is a federal group that will make recommendations for systematically improving healthcare while reducing healthcare cost. Achievement of semantic interoperability through the use of ontology software in high priority health IT projects will both save money and improve the quality of care. From the local level, to the Regional Health Information Organization level, to the level of states and provinces to the national and international levels, the importance of developing and/or adopting healthcare standards for electronic digital healthcare informatiion systems cannot be overestimated.

Shahid N. Shah

Unstructured Information Management Architecture SDK for Healthcare IT applications

IBM’s alphaWorks has announced an update to their Unstructured Information Management Architecture SDK. It’s a fascinating tool for use in our industry, though it was not designed specifically for healthcare applications. As we all know the majority of healthcare information is unstructured in nature but we try to force it into a particular structure because as IT people we like to reduce things to a relational data model where possible. We do this because there are lots of tools and technologies available to store, query, format, report, convert, and maintain relational data.

Shahid N. Shah

Inside the Venture Capital process

Although this post is not exactly about healthcare IT, it is about enabling healthcare IT by getting some money for your startup. I talk regularly to entrepreneurs who pitch ideas (which is one of my favorite parts of blogging) and many of them aren’t sure how to get their ideas funded. Having been through several money raising rounds in my previous startups I recommend not raising money from VCs unless you have absolutely no choice; use angel money, bootstrapping, etc.

Shahid N. Shah

Software Demonstrations are like watching TV (no, that’s not a good thing)

Will Weider over at Candid CIO posted a great new article: ET and Software Demonstrations. I especially loved what he said about the “Cannit” part of software demonstrations: I know I am trapped in a bad demonstration when a volley begins between participants and demonstrators. Each question begins with “Can it…” Of course each response is “Yes.” Or my favorite “Yes, with customization,” which is vendorspeak for NO. There are so many problems with this approach I don’t know where to begin.

Shahid N. Shah

File Compression for Remote Diagnosis

A big challenge these days in remote diagnosis technology is getting those big images sent from one place to another. World Changing reported recently about File Compression for Remote Diagnosis. Jamais Cascio said: Researchers have known for a few years now that applying a mathematical transformation method known as “wavelets” to radiological images can improve the ability of doctors to detect cancer. But Bradley Lucier’s team of mathematicians at Purdue has taken the process to a new level — by using the wavelets method to compress mammogram images by 98%, not only can radiologists still detect cancer better than they can with unmodified images, the mammograms become small enough to send easily over the dial-up computer networks common in poorer parts of the world.

Shahid N. Shah

Corporate blogging in Healthcare sector

John Cass recently interviewed me about my thoughts on corporate blogging in healthcare. Matthew Holt was also nice enough to pick up on it. My basic suggestion in the interview was that all healthcare companies (but especially those in IT) should be blogging and setup interactive forums to discuss their products with their customers. Healthcare is ultimately a “local business” so all healthcare is local and it’s very difficult to create “one size fits all” solutions in our industry.

Shahid N. Shah

Now we’re talkin’! Bill would hike tax deductions for health IT

Modern Healthcare in their daily HITs newsletter is reporting that Representative Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) introduced a bill in the House that would increase tax deductions for healthcare providers who purchase IT systems. They reported: The bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Charles Norwood (R-Ga.), Shelley Moore (R-W.Va.) and Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), amends the Internal Revenue Code so that in the first year of purchase, providers would see an equipment deduction go from $100,000 to $250,000 and see an increase in the maximum annual total of deductible property go from $400,000 to $600,000.

Shahid N. Shah

Repeat after me: healthcare data models matter

As we all know, healthcare applications come and go but data lives on forever. We’ve seen that since the beginning of the computer industry; when we move from legacy systems into more “modern” architectures, we often leave behind applications but we almost always take along the data into the future. Even though data is so important, we in health IT don’t seem to spend the quality time necessary to structure our schemas and databases in such a way as to make it easier to maintain in the future.

Shahid N. Shah
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