October 10, 2010

Another medical records rant

I’ve previously ranted about the medical information problems in connection with my father’s care at Friendship Village of Dublin and Riverside Methodist Hospital (among others). Well, they’re getting worse. Read more

October 10, 2010

A few notes from XLDB 4

As much as I believe in the XLDB conferences, I only found time to go to (a big) part of one day of XLDB 4 myself. In general:  Read more

October 10, 2010

Notes and links October 10 2010

More quick-hit notes, links, and so on:  Read more

September 27, 2010

A rant about medical records

It is very difficult to convey utterly tedious frustration without — well, without thoroughly boring one’s audience. And hence I will not try to explain the full awfulness of modern medical records and information compartmentalization. But I was personally present 5 times in one recent week while Linda gave detailed information about her contact information, medical history, etc. — and all 5 times it was to the same hospital.

In our case, that just costs time. But the information flow in my father’s case upsets me more. Read more

September 13, 2010

Reconciling medical privacy and elder care

In a previous post, I outlined how Friendship Village of Dublin has mishandled my father’s medical information, to the detriment of his medical care. Expanding on that story, here are some other complications or screw-ups in the same series of medical events. In these other cases, the blame clearly falls more on the information-flow system itself, rather than on some particular medical care provider such as Friendship Village of Dublin, Riverside Methodist Hospital, or the paramedics who transported my father from one to the other.

Read more

January 15, 2010

Intersystems Cache’ highlights

I talked with Robert Nagle of Intersystems last week, and it went better than at least one other Intersystems briefing I’ve had. Intersystems’ main product is Cache’, an object-oriented DBMS introduced in 1997 (before that Intersystems was focused on the fourth-generation programming language M, renamed from MUMPS). Unlike most other OODBMS, Cache’ is used for a lot of stuff one would think an RDBMS would be used for, across all sorts of industries. That said, there’s a distinct health-care focus to Intersystems, in that:

Note: Intersystems Cache’ is sold mainly through VARs (Value-Added Resellers), aka ISVs/OEMs. I.e., it’s sold by people who write applications on top of it.

So far as I understand – and this is still pretty vague and apt to be partially erroneous – the Intersystems Cache’ technical story goes something like this: Read more

August 16, 2008

A NoteWorthy win for Intersystems Cache’

A small Microsoft SQL Server-based medical application vendor called NoteWorthy Medical Systems bought a small Intersystems Cache’-based medical application vendor called Mars Medical Systems. NoteWorthy then decided to rebuild its product line on Intersystems Cache’. A press release ensued.*

*In general, my criticisms of Intersystems’ stealth marketing are beginning to be relaxed. On the other hand, if you want to be technical, I still haven’t actually talked with the company for years …

I spoke briefly with Mark Conner, founder of Mars Medical and now EVP of NoteWorthy, about why he so loves Cache’. (I asked what he disliked about the product; his response was an emphatic “Nothing”.) It basically boils down to two reasons:

The latter feature is crucial to small ISVs selling application software to even smaller users, and is a big part of why Progress and Intersystems have large share in that market. More generally, it’s the most important and common technical advantage that mid-range database management systems generally enjoy versus the market leaders. (The other big advantage, of course, is pricing.)

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