My Visit to Ball State's CICS Program

On November 12th I was invited to speak at Ball State's CICS Placement Seminar for it's graduate students.  The goal of this seminar is to prepare the students for their upcoming entrance into the IT work environment.  It was an honor to share the platform with the individuals listed below and I was amazed that all of our presentations intertwined although we had never talked beforehand.  My talk, titled "After CICS Begins Now", focused on making sure the students are taking time now to think about what they want to do after graduation.  I focused a portion of this presentation on building your career brand via social media.



Beau King of ATT presented on personal Salesmanship
Branden Bute of Ball State presented on Job Mining
Todd Hollowell & Amy Reid presented on Resume Building

Good luck to all the students upon their completion of CICS.

Beyond the EMR: Improving Patient Care - Microsoft Healthcare Briefing

Rich Nero - Healthcare Solutions Group presents Beyond the EMR with a focus on Amalga. Provided below are some high level notes from his presentation

To date, Microsoft has spent 1 Billion on Healthcare Solutions Group.

Microsoft's goal is to fill the gap to provide useful information that is stored in clinical systems and data warehouses, this gap is filled by Microsoft's Amalga solution.

Amalga's goal is to the streamline operations, coordinate care, and engage patients.

5 Areas where Microsoft believes Amalga can provide value:

• Improve Patient Safety & Quality
• Readmissions - solution is Readmission Manager
• Early Warning Score
• Revenue & Cost Optimization
• Compliance Tracking and Reporting
• Coordinating Care Across Providers
• Engaging Patients In Care
• Care Transitions
• Chronic Disease Management

Items in BOLD are their primary focus today and where Microsoft has use cases.

Essentially Amalga is a Business Intelligence solution that Healthcare focused.  Its advantage is that it is a platform versus a bunch of individual solutions.  The challenge they have is that some of their solutions are already built into clinical systems.