I wrote a blog for two years. It was called “The Integrative Stream”, and it ran to 170 posts, some of which were marginally interesting. That blog stopped in 2006 for a very simple reason – I moved down to DC to spend a year working for the US government, as a member of the policy staff at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Working for the government is an interesting experience, but it has a couple of drawbacks. One is that you’re not supposed to publish anything related to your area of responsibility without going through many, many layers of approval. My blog, which focused on the healthcare and software businesses, certainly fell into that category.

So now it’s 2009.  After my year in government I moved back to Boston, and started working on a project to build a “Translational Informatics” group at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program. Starting with projects in the Personally Controlled Health Record area, we built up a great team, and developed some interesting new technologies and processes for doing software development, better, in healthcare. It’s a great team, and when I started thinking about doing a blog again, I decided to invite them all to join me.

So we’ve got quite a group: a software architect turned MBA healthcare policy wonk, a couple of computer scientists, a user interaction designer, and a doctor. They’ll introduce themselves over the next week or so, and this blog is going to cover quite a few areas. At one end of the spectrum, we’ll look at companies and business models in the Health IT space and policy issues for promoting the use of technology in healthcare.  But we like to do things on the ground, so we’ll be covering a lot of brass tacks topics too. So expect to see Java code, thoughts on the software development process, and explorations of user-centric, goal-oriented design as applied to healthcare software. There may also be recipes.

Should you read it? Yes. Obviously, the healthcare policy audience may not be interested in software development processes or neat Java tricks, so we’ve organized the blog into categories that should make it an easier read.  If you have any suggestions or comments, you can reach us at info (AT) rmatics.org.