Martin Sizemore

After reading Fast Company’s article on how IBM’s Watson is learning its way to save lives, there was a moment where I wondered if IBM’s claim of Watson being the first machine of the third wave of computing, called cognitive computing, might impact the current rapidly growing market for traditional business intelligence, especially in healthcare. […]

To quote ProPubilica.org: “It is a hospital’s nightmare: The power goes out and the backup generators don’t kick in, leaving critically ill patients without the mechanical help they need to breathe.” Hurricane Katrina and the patients that died in dark New Orleans hospitals should have taught us what happens when electricity and water cut out. […]

Sometimes an idea seems too simple to work in order to solve a complex problem. That was my reaction when I first read about the Direct Project. I am one of those people that really hates filling out the clipboard in the doctor’s office because I can’t remember when I had my gall bladder out. […]

According to a U.S. Senate Panel on Healthcare, healthcare fraud and abuse costs as much as $100 billion a year, or 10 percent of the $1 trillion spent on healthcare. In addition, these fraud costs are increasing at a rate of $3 billion a year. The traditional approach has been to pay claims and then […]

Prior to HIMSS 2011, I blogged about the 3 reasons for using a Managed Private Cloud for Interoperability. In that blog, I noted that in healthcare circles, cloud computing conjures up fears for protecting private healthcare information and security compliance concerns. In the last few weeks, Microsoft has introduced support for HIPAA compliance in their […]

In healthcare consulting, we discuss the patient-centric view frequently. We want our EMRs, our clinical data repositories, and business processes to be patient-centric and focused on a complete view from that vantage point. On June 21st, I had the privilege of touring the new Kaiser Permanente Center for Total Health located near Union Station in […]

There is a strong interest in the healthcare providers tackling population health management, especially as it relates to efforts to build Accountable Care Organizations. The idea of identifying a regional population including all care settings, acute, ambulatory, skilled nursing facilities and more, then sorting out the high risk, chronic illness members for improving their health […]

In the months after Perficient published a whitepaper on Gamification, the interest from our readers has been gratifying and it seems to be time for a follow-up to that interest. Business gamification is the use of game mechanics and user interfaces in business software. What are the practical uses of gamification in a healthcare workplace? […]

From time to time, it is a good idea to re-evaluate potential IT architectures especially with the cost reduction pressures in healthcare IT. The growth in maturity of several key players in the open source software arena is gaining the attention and respect of healthcare IT decision-makers and worth evaluation as a lower cost alternative. […]

In the closing weeks before the Christmas holiday, I made a whirlwind tour of several large integrated delivery networks (IDNs) in search of the newest Holy Grail in healthcare: Managing Population Health. The race to Accountable Care Organizations and Shared Savings performance contracts has resulted in a new level of enterprise data integration never imagined […]

We live in a period of time in healthcare where there is enormous pressure to analyze and compete based on the information buried in IT systems. The volume of healthcare data swells by a staggering 35 per cent per year. Worse than the volume is the fact that 80% of stored health information today consists […]

Once upon a time, when you took a stroll down the aisle of an airplane in mid-flight, you would see lots of people playing solitaire on their Windows laptops. Today, you see many, many more people engaged in intense concentration on game of “Angry Birds.” Angry Birds is an addictive, fun, easy to play game […]