TamGroup Blog

 Key points from the February 5 IBM Power Systems Announcement

Interoperability of healthcare solutions, or healthcare information exchange, regardless of whether it is ambulatory or enterprise focused, is one of the biggest challenges in the effort to drive patient-centric delivery of data at the point-of-care.  The essential element required for achieving this paradigm shift is to switch from reactive to proactive data. From what we read in today’s interface and exchange culture this seems like a simple concept; Health Information Exchanges, ACO's, Patient Centered Medical Home, Meaningful Use are all at the center as a catalyst for patient-centered care models.

The notion of Health Information Exchange as a discipline is something that we all know needs to happen - yet despite the multiple millions of dollars that have been spent on HIE efforts and organizations, the results are sporadic at best. Why is the goal of removing friction out of the healthcare process so elusive when most agree on the benefits?  

Healthcare information technology (Health IT) represents one of the more complex and challenging information technology deployment models, and thus spends proportionately more on technology that other industries. 

PureSystems from IBM are the latest converged data center hardware, systems which pack compute, storage and networking into one enclosure, to hit the market. Although a bit late to market these systems have some interesting differentiators and are a good fit for organizations that have an investment in IBM technologies.

HL7 integration engines will be the next interoperability bridge in Healthcare. It will bring together the coordination of provider EMR’s, practice management systems, and health information exchanges (HIE)’s. There are numerous “brute force” mapping options for the health level seven (HL7) standards in Healthcare.

IBM's recently announced PureSystems, a converged infrastructure for data centers holds some promise for healthcare providers if the capabilities live up to their billing.  Let's face it, most healthcare providers have a number of systems from various providers that typically represent silos of infrastructure and information.  The trouble facing Healthcare IT organizations is that the complexity this creates is a costly environment to manage.

You're building a data warehouse, and you want to indicate what U.S. Census regions your customers are in for analytics purposes.

You're an architect and you've just entered a new environment: a company in the throes of business and IT transformation initiatives.  Your task is to design a new system to replace what's already there, achieving enterprise transformation that yields competetive advantage. 

Simplified deployment and management of servers, networks, storage and virtualization has been trumpeted by many vendors for their products.  In some cases they delivered that capability for their respective products, but not the entire infrastructure.   In an industry first, IBM is delivering integrated management for the complete infrastructure stack in the next generation platform called IBM PureSystem.  This Expert Integrated System has captured the experience of thousands of server, network, storage and virtualization deployments and merges it into a single management interface, the IBM Flex System Manager.