IT/Medicine Integration

darkerosxx

Does anyone have good resources for info about how the wide field of medicine is incorporating modern information technology?

No, this isn't a school report or anything, I'm wanting to fill my brain.

eMeS

I have 3 customers at the moment that are either hospitals or networks of hospitals. They depend heavily on their IT, and you'll find just about everything within their walls.

Do you have a more specific question? I could just ramble on, but that's all it would amount to....

The most interesting one (to me) is my customer that is a treatment center, but is also a research/teaching hospital. They have tons of supercomputers, which makes for some interesting times.

MS

Pash

Well I spent 3 year supporting remote/onsite for a large pharmaceutical organisation, top 20 in the world. They were R&D division based at a very well known UK academic establishment in Central London. As a support contractor in effect sometimes my role was very hard, at all times they are the customer and service delivery was very hard to maintain.

On to topic. Simply put, IT in R&D for pharmaceutical/medicine companies is completely mainstream now. Time in the LAB, even for chemistry groups is really nothing without data stored on their IT systems. These guys run systems that get years of scanning done on cell plates that are shipped in from all over the world. This is high content screening and cellular analysis for drug discovery. Hugely important research for everybody. Imagine one morning sitting in the IT room doing some scripting, writing change controls and then a guy from pharmacology walks in with a huge smile on his face. "Seriously, Mark thank you very much for your help and support for the last 3 years, one of my plates came good!!!". I helped this guy a lot with these data storage of his projects over those 3 years, literally sending off TB's of data to offsite storage, assisting him with issues on his desktops where he would analyse data, contacting the vendor for him to keep his apps up to date. There is so much reward in helping out someone that will stop jumping up and down the labs for long enough to pop downstairs and thank you for assisting him. Never mind the fact this guy spent 4-5 years of his life working on this single project.

It is a fun and interesting industry to work for from an IT perspective and very rewarding. Id love to find another systems admin job based inhouse doing similar work. It's a shame my current place lost the contract coz our price was too high on renew

darkerosxx

eMeS wrote: »

Do you have a more specific question? I could just ramble on, but that's all it would amount to....

The easiest answer to that question is no. I'm a late bloomer changing my career to medicine. I'm dropping my MBA studies and going straight into Biology/Pre-Medicine. I want to leverage my IT knowledge and complete some research while in Pre-Med to not only broaden my horizons, but also to better my chances of getting into the medical school I'm aiming for.

I'm keeping my day job, so I'll keep on expanding my IT knowledge, which I will continue to do even after I move on to medical school. My IT skill set and business knowledge from my MBA studies set me apart from the normal med school applicant, so I want to do something to solidly show that separation.

I'm thinking about doing theory papers on complex clinical decision support systems and the modern legal/financial/business ramifications of their use, as well as theory papers on best practice implementations of such systems.

Qord

I think the best way to get a good idea of how they are meshing would be to look at the curriculum from schools that offer a medical IT program. Check out the objectives, course descriptions, and also look at the manufacturers of newer medical IT gear.

My 2¢

Paul Boz

That's the name of the game where I work. We're the largest home healthcare company in the country with over 13,000 distributed clinicians in the field. We have internally developed all of our applications for interacting with these distributed caregivers and constantly work towards greater mobility and connectivity for the entire employee base. Several of our initiatives involve greater functionality for these employees (email access, persistent VPN, greater and more powerful mobile hardware, etc. With this greater level of connectivity comes the requirement for strong security controls though.

Every time you extend functionality you have to put controls around it. For example, we’re rolling out email access to 13,000 users who have never had email access before. Because these users are in patients’ homes and are transacting patient information we have to ensure that they’re not using email to get data out of the network. To control this we’ve developed Forefront UAG host checking, Exchange rules to limit emails to internal only, and have even developed uses cases for and deployed McAfee host-based Data Loss Prevention software. We’re also providing always-on VPN access to these users in conjunction with air-cards so that they have the ultimate in mobile connectivity. With this access comes the requirement to have persistent VPN without split tunneling, NAC agents, and limitations on internal access. All 25k+ systems in our network have full-disk encryption which if deployed poorly, is impossible to manage.

These are just small examples of the day to day security requirements for expanding information access. We have a 250+ person IT department that works basically 24/7 to stay ahead of the rest of the market. We have become the biggest and best in the industry through technology. Our board of directors and senior management embraces technology as the primary driver of the business so there is a huge emphasis on rapid development and deployment while maintaining strict security. This is the direction that healthcare is going in and must go in to reduce healthcare costs. So much money is wasted using archaic patient record systems that it HAS to go in this direction. Hospitals are also faced with unique challenges with regards to expanding connectivity for doctors and clinicians. Many hospitals now provide doctors with mobile tablets and have secured wireless deployed so that doctors can see more patients and have more up-to-date and pertinent records for those patients. You can only imagine the security that must go into such a deployment.

You must also consider the strict regulatory requirements which pertain to PII/healthcare information. In banking if you’re in violation of GLBA, FDIC, etc, you just get a fine. In the medical industry, HIPAA violations can put you in prison. We conduct several thousand audits per year to ensure that we’re within compliance with HIPAA, HITECH, SOX (because we’re publicly traded) and many other audit frameworks. Every time you add an additional layer of technology you increase the complexity of your environment and have to account for that through audit. If all of a sudden you go from having 1000 email users at corporate to 25k+ email users you have to take a strong step back and analyze that massively increased footprint for data loss potential and create controls to ensure that the organization isn’t at risk.

I can go on and on for days about this. Do you have any more specific questions?

gosh1976

As a coincidence I have a friend that lives out in California who is an MCSE and he is going back to UCLA in the Spring. I don't think if he has decided to go for Surgical RN or Surgical PA or he may decide to go ahead and continue on and get his MD. He was Pre-med many years ago so I guess a lot of his chemistry and biology courses will transfer over.

He said he is just tired of IT but I think he is still going to take a couple more certs to finish upgrading his MCSE to MCITP.

I wonder if he has considered what doors may be opened due to his somewhat unique skill set for the medical community. Not only would that set someone apart when applying for school or certain positions but I bet there are also some really interesting things a medical person could get into when they already have years of experience and certifications in IT.

Cert Poor

IT + Medicine = "Bioinformatics". Have fun Googling.

darkerosxx

Thanks for the posts, all. It's all good info.

I'm going with researching complex clinical decision support systems since I want to be an anesthesiologist. I want to research systems that will help in this environment. Should be fun!