June 11, 2013
The health IT industry faces an interesting period in time as we consider that digitizing processes is really just the first step in improving the quality of health care, increasing efficiencies, enhancing patient safety and reducing overall health care costs. For example, we’re moving toward intelligent, personalized health management systems that work to keep you healthy, rather than simply care for you when you are sick.
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January 09, 2013
2012 was also a great year for our blog. We saw increased views, as well as an increase in the average time spent on each post. We're working hard to make this space an engaging, informative and, hopefully, entertaining resource for those of you interested in health care, health IT or our company. Thank you for reading!
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December 19, 2012
This is a tale of two forces whose combined synergies have created a perfect storm triggering an urgent call to action. Our protagonists, scalable trust and patient engagement, are driving the escalation of solutions to a long-standing problem in Direct exchange: the establishment of trust between HISPs.
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October 23, 2012
Early this year, a conversation spawned between a colleague and me regarding usage of the Direct Project in workflows other than simple email. It quickly became apparent that he had a specific use case in mind and was focused on a not-so-well understood section of the Direct Project specification: disposition notifications (how the Direct Project implements quality of service [QoS]).
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September 18, 2012
Last week, Clay Patterson shared his thoughts on the recent Consumer Health IT Summit sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology ("the ONC"). While he was there, I tweeted Cerner's pledge to support the View, Download, and Transmit challenge (#VDTNow) issued by Farzad Mostashari, head of the ONC.
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April 12, 2012
In part one of this series on the Direct Project, I discussed the backbone transport and message gateway the program uses. In part two, I explored Direct’s security and trust modules and the importance of establishing meaningful trust relationships between HISPs. In this brief, final post, I will define edge protocols and clients and briefly touch on a few policy elements that govern the day-to-day operations of Direct.
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April 10, 2012
In part one of this series, I dissected the Direct Project into discrete modules and provided a relatively in-depth view of the backbone transport and message gateway. In this post, I'll dive into the lifeblood of Direct: security and trust.
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April 06, 2012
Over the past month, I've taken on the daunting task of compiling my knowledge of the technical ins and outs of the Direct Project into an online developer's handbook to assist both my Cerner brethren and third party developers who have chosen Cerner Direct as their full-service health information service provider (HISP). As I looked back over the content, I realized there is a lot of material that is useful to a broader audience in the Direct community. So in the spirit of knowledge sharing, I'm sharing my insight (wisdom?) in a series of blog posts.
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December 15, 2011
On December 8th, I again had the privilege to organize and host a Direct Project virtual connect-a-thon. This was the fifth virtual connect-a-thon held by the Direct Project reference implementation workgroup, and the second time we’ve hosted it at Cerner. As an indication of Direct’s increasing momentum, this was the largest connect-a-thon to date, consisting of more than 20 companies, with 13 actively participating HISPs.
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July 13, 2011
While certainly a valuable application workflow to layer on top of the Direct Project, equating the output of the Direct Project to an email application does it a disservice and underestimates its potential.
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June 10, 2011
As the Cerner Direct team has been working with our pilots, continuing to tweak our Web Inbox and HISP (Health Information Service Provider) services, and responding to RFPs, our whiteboard has been filling up with thoughts about what we’d look for when choosing a Direct HISP. It’s time to put those thoughts in a blog post.To be clear, our notes aren’t about choosing HISP software/services from a third party in order to become a HISP. Rather, they’re for organizations that intend to sign up with a service provider and begin securely exchanging health information, leaving the infrastructure build-out and maintenance to an organization that’s making a business of offering the services. In that sense, we’ve been thinking along the lines of choosing a cable provider or telecommunications carrier.
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April 20, 2011
There they were. My new glasses, sitting on the floor, chewed up by a tough-looking pug who didn't care. Worse, I had a schedule full of meetings the next day and didn't have a spare pair of glasses. The next afternoon, I went to a local one-hour glasses shop in my prescription sunglasses and asked them to have my eyeglass prescription faxed from my optometrist so we could get new glasses started. That's when the fun began.
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