Software as a Service (SaaS)

See the following -

10 Startups That Turn Complexity Into Simplicity

Alex Williams | TechCrunch | April 7, 2013

Here’s the thing about simplicity. It’s all relative. A developer’s idea of simplicity is different from a finance chief or a customer service agent. Read More »

18 Ways To Differentiate Open Source Products From Upstream Suppliers

Successful open source products must be able to charge a cost that is sufficient to pay for the defrayed upstream open source contributions (development costs) and the downstream productization costs (vendor costs). Stated another way, products can only charge a sufficient price if they create value that can only be captured by customers paying for them. That might sound harsh, but it's a reality for all products. There's a saying in product management: Pray to pay doesn't work. With that said, don't be too worried. There are ethical ways to capture value.

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A Definition of Cloud Computing (and How Healthcare Can Best Use It)

Shahid Shah | Med City News | December 25, 2011

A few years ago NIST came up with the first drafts of the seminal definitions of Cloud Computing; they ended up setting the stage for communicating complex technical concepts and helping making ’Cloud’ a household name. After 15 drafts, the 16th and final definition was published as The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing (NIST Special Publication 800-145) in September. Read More »

A Discussion of Medicaid’s $5 Billion/Year IT Infrastructure Transformation

CMS provides funding to the tune of 5 billion dollars per year to support the Medicaid information technology platforms run by the states. In December 2015, CMS issued a final rule, Mechanized Claims Processing and Information Retrieval Systems (90%  Federal/10% State), to assist states to update Medicaid Management Information Systems (MMIS) in over 20 states. These changes will allow states to improve customer service and support the dynamic nature of Medicaid eligibility, enrollment, and delivery systems. Also within this rule was language directing the Medicaid Enterprise towards an open, modular architecture.

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A Framework For Building Products From Open Source Projects

If your experience with technology resembles mine in any way, you know intuitively that the projects we DIY are not the same as the products we spend money buying. This isn't a new observation in the open source community...Sarah Novotny, who led the Kubernetes community and was heavily involved in the Nginx and MySQL communities, emphatically articulated at the inaugural Open Core Summit that the open source project a company shepherds and the product that a company sells are two completely different things. Yet, project and product continue to be conflated by maintainers-turned-founders of commercial open source software (COSS) companies, especially (and ironically) when the open source project gets traction. This mistake gets repeated, I believe, because it's hard to mentally conceptualize how and why a commercial product should be different when the open source project is already being used widely.

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A Manifesto on Interoperability in Health Care IT

Stephanie Losee | Forbes | March 29, 2012

I’ve just completed a seven-week road show – my second cross-country trip in a year – visiting with health care professionals trying to make the world more healthful and connected through the use of technology. And after all those meetings I can tell you unequivocally that the vast majority of health care information technology challenges in the U.S. are the result of illogical or short-sighted business choices, not the technology challenges themselves...

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A New Era Of Application Services At Puppet Labs

Chris Price | Puppet Labs | April 11, 2014

Recently at Puppet Labs, we’ve been putting a lot of thought into how to make our server-side applications faster, smarter, and more modular. Today, we’re excited to give you a sneak peek into the future of some of this work.

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A New Pricing Model for Medicaid Management Information Systems (MMIS)

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) recent $5 billion-per-year commitment to modular Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS) technologies has signaled a long-overdue paradigm shift in the way we think about Medicaid information systems. This shift is already beginning to revolutionize and improve a health care system that over 73 million people depend on every day. Currently, MMIS services is at least a $7 billion-per-year industry. As the influence of modular, cloud-based, and SaaS (Software as a Service) technologies continue to exert themselves on MMIS, this industry will mature and move into the 21st century. One exciting aspect of this maturation will be a new pricing model for MMIS services.

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Are Client Server EHR Holding Back Healthcare?

John Lynn | EMR & HIPAA | December 19, 2014

The number one topic of debate on this blog has definitely been Client Server EHR versus SaaS EHR...No doubt both sides have a case to make and we’ll see both in healthcare for a long time to come...

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BlueEHS, the Electronic Health Solution, now available on Amazon AWS Market place

Press Release | ZH Healthcare | May 28, 2015

H Healthcare (ZH), a leading provider of Health IT solutions, announced today that it is releasing BlueEHS, the Electronic Health Solution, on the Amazon AWS platform as an Amazon Machine Image for the benefit of all AWS users worldwide. ZH Healthcare is the developer of BlueEHS, a first of its kind, Freemium, SaaS, Electronic Health Solution (EHS). BlueEHS offers a customizable Electronic Health Records (EHR) with an integrated practice management system (PMS), e-Rx, lab interfaces, a telemedicine-enabled comprehensive patient portal, and more.

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Cloud-based Vendors Giving Health IT A Boost

Xavier E. Martinez | Power Your Practice | October 16, 2013

According to a recent Black Book Rankings report, 17% of physician practices are considering switching EHR vendors by January 2014. So, it should come as no surprise that many are looking for health IT vendors with a fresh approach to fulfilling physician software needs. Read More »

Creating Affordable Solutions with Open Source Tools

Open source is often the heart of many civic technology solutions because using open source leverages the minds of many. Small web solution providers, in particular, often turn to open source as a way to deliver services without having to reinvent the wheel. I recently found out about Digital Deployment, a civic web solution provider in Sacramento, that leverages open source, and so I asked them to share their story with me. I chatted on the phone with Chief Operating Officer Sloane Dell'Orto and Lead Software Engineer Dennis Stevense...

Data Exchange Vendor Metriport Adopts Open Source

Metriport is addressing a problem similar to other IT companies in health care—a service to ingest and clean patient data for tasks such as providing care summaries during a patient transition—but is doing so in a very unusual way: through an entirely open source service. Because the choice to go open source is so central to their business model, I will discuss the importance of free and open source software in health care, then explain Metriport's service.

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Do I Need to Provide Access to Source Code Under the AGPLv3 License?

The GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3) is a copyleft license nearly identical to the GPLv3. Both licenses have the same copyleft scope, but materially differ in one important way. The AGPLv3's Section 13 states an additional condition not present in GPLv2 or GPLv3: "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software"...

Epic Challenge: What The Emergence Of An EMR Giant Means For The Future Of Healthcare Innovation

David Shaywitz | Forbes | June 9, 2012

Medicine has been notoriously slow to embrace the electronic medical record (EMR), but, spurred by tax incentives and the prospect of cost and outcomes accountability, the use of electronic medical records (EMRs) is finally catching on. Read More »