News 01/19/04

It's a quiet news day since it's a holiday for at least a few people (not me,) so my apologies if it's a bit skimpy. Hey, at least it's free.

I mentioned storage solution vendor XIOtech before, so here's another mention: University of Kansas Medical Center chooses their SAN solution.

A nice jump in Q4 revenue and profit for GE Medical Systems.

A brief mention of an idea I'm hearing lately: equal roles for a company's CTO and CIO, even in hospitals. That's surprising since both positions seem to be in a decline nationally, with reduced authority for those CIOs who survive. I've heard that even Hersher and Associates, self-proclaimed as having virtually invented the CIO position in healthcare, is quietly encouraging hospitals to eliminate that position in favor of hands-on IT folks who report to the CFO.

An HIStalk reader and MEDITECH exec reports a big sale for the company. MEDITECH will provide systems to seven regions of Alberta, Canada. This is a big project involving over 100 facilities and 6,000 beds running from a single data center. A province-wide electronic health record is the eventual goal. And if you're looking for a sales job, they're hiring. Also, I noticed they capitalize all the letters in MEDITECH, so I'll try to remember that.

I did a quick web search on MEDITECH and came up with some amazing (to me) factoids. Their founder, chairman, and CEO Neil Pappalardo is an interesting guy. From this page: "The main character of the next flashback chapter is one of the most imaginative and productive computer scientists it has been my privilege to know - Neil Pappalardo. I first knew Neil when he was a student of mine at MIT and did his senior thesis in my cardiovascular laboratory. He and Curt Marble, a fellow MIT student, joined me after graduation from MIT as Research Assistants studying cardiovascular system control. We were using mathematical models to analyze the feedback control of cardiovascular function and became heavily involved in the use of computers - first a PDP-4, then a PDP-7. In about 1965-1966, Neil and Curt tried to persuade me that we could develop a programming system that would support the development of medical information systems at MGH. For some months, I tried to discourage them from what I felt to be a radical and obviously unproductive activity - after all, what competency and experience did a hospital-based group have in comparison with the giants in the field who were not yet able to provide a viable, reasonably inexpensive, easy to program, time-sharing system. Neil, however ignored my guidance, as was his usual habit, proceeded with the development of MUMPS, and in a few months, had a system that was exciting and promising. To this day, I have not been able to trace who first thought of that name, or why we did not come up with a more dignified title. The development and use of MUMPS quickly became a dominant theme of our Laboratory. Indeed, it is my impression that one of the important reasons that MUMPS evolved into a powerful and easy to use language was that the development was carried out in an environment where there was very close communication between the potential users and the system designers." Trivia: MUMPS stands for Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System, according to this page. 

MEDITECH has interesting web pages, too. One honors their marketing supervisor who died on American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11, 2001. You can get the skinny on their campus swans or their border collie Abby who was "hired" to scare off the Canada geese. Or, check out their digs or what's on the lunch menu. And, a very cool anthology that says they have 1,789 customers.

You won't find that kind of information on Cerner's or McKesson's site, but Epic Systems talks about itself on its web page: "We are housed in a beautiful, modern building with large conference rooms, fireplaces, and plenty of artwork. For snacking, coffee, tea, cocoa, milk, fruit juice, mineral water, and microwave popcorn are free. At lunchtime, we pay the delivery charges for orders from area restaurants. Epic welcomes pets on weekends. Epic believes you are most productive when you are comfortable. You define "comfortable" for yourself: jeans and sandals, business suit, etc. We offer many social activities, including an annual anniversary dinner and a company picnic. Employees receive fine chocolates on Valentine's Day and their birthdays. We also offer a Halloween contest, a Choca-holic Challenge, and a Pi(e) Party. Epic also sponsors a variety of sports teams." I guess my hospital bennies of 20% off high cafeteria prices and free parking about a quarter mile away from my office don't compare to a fireplace and casual day every day.

What database is hottest right now? Apparently open source (and therefore free) MySQL. I've worked with web scripts that use it, usually on the so-called LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) and never had a problem. I'm a fan.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital buys big iron for genetic research. Their new IBM supercomputer, which does the work of 280 servers, places them at 251st of the top 500 supercomputer users in the world. I wonder whether they looked at grid computing?