I was very happy to get my first job at Sutter Health's Surgery Department in my youth. I became very interested in the medical sciences, and was focused on this part of the Healthcare industry. Working with some of the great Neuro Surgeons, Orthopedic Surgeons, Anestesoligists, Nurses and others , I decided that I would take on education in the medical field. My college experience at Sacramento City College was focused on biological sciences, mathematics, physics and engineering. Working in the O/R made me pationate with the future of Healthcare, and ended up keeping me in the industry for over thirty years. While I thought I would stay in the medical sciences, I ended up becoming extremly focused on applying computing to the industry because I understood the opportunties in improving performance for Healthcare, and how I should create a better experience for the clinical staff so they could focus on their patients.
After taking on the performance improvement project in the O/R, a new job was created for me in Nursing Administration. The position was created for 'Patient Care Operations Analyst'. I focused on applying statistics and data visualization for the Nursing Administration group in the late 1980s. While I continued to study in the are of software development related to data, the I.T. department reached out to me and hired me as a Data Analyst. We built analytics for the finanical, and operations departments. This was a great job, and I enjoyed working with the team on the data side for healthcare. When the organization decided to build their own Electronic Medical Record in the early 1990s, I was promoted to a position Strategic Planning Analyst in the I.T. department. I was able to not only work on the EMR, I also project managed the implementation of technology to adopt Capitation in our Healthcare organization.
I finally left Sutter Health after I had been there for 13 years in the early 1990s. I had met a CEO of the Decision Support Group (DSG) software company that was developing a new Data Analytics system for heatlhcare. I ended up migrating down to southern California as one of their developers, and was very excited because I could use the language Smalltalk to depoloy to our customers. We were one of the first companies that ever developed a data visualization system that would provide an interactive system in the Apple Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows enviornment.
We are working with Healthcare IT organizations to help simplify their environment so that they can focus on creating an exceptional experience for their workforce..
Blog Posts are just about me remembering what I’m doing!
I’ve been very fortunate to be in healthcare throughout my career. My introduction to the industry occurred when I took on a job in the O/R at Sutter Health. I ended up getting a position as a Surgical attendant in the O/R department at age 19 which was all about ensuring the patients were in the operating room at the right time and making sure the O/R was clean. While I ended up on the I.
Neo4j in the language R I have been fortunate to work with the Neo4j graph database using the language R over the last two years. A former data scientist that worked for Neo4j, Nicole White, implemented the package RNeo4j and released it in 2015. This solution enabled R developers and data scientists to access the Neo4j database in the R language. The package uses the Neo4j REST API and then process the data in a data.
Data are one of the most import resources in Healthcare to enable the Triple Aim. If you not familiar with the triple aim, it is focused on: Better Health Better Care Lower Cost Better health means that your organization and you are working on finding ways to create a better experience for the healthcare population that you support. Better care requires that you are delivering care at the highest level.
I have wanted to make a blog post for awhile to describe how I think we can extend the power of the Healthcare Information Technology environment. My focus has been on the development and the management of Healthcare I.T. since the late 1980’s. I have worked for several Health Systems, including Sutter Health, St. Luke’s Idaho, Tahoe Forest as an employee and as a consultant, I have worked with dozen’s of other Health Systems.
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