What’s this blog about?

This is a blog about the future of healthcare, and the future of software development. It’s not the only one, but it may be the only one where the authors couldn’t decide whether they wanted to have a software development blog, a “how to run a startup” blog or a healthcare policy and punditry blog, and therefore decided to just do all of them at once.

This means that the causual visitor may be confronted with some content that is of fairly minimal interest. We’ve tried to help by creating a good category system. If all you care about is “Making Software”, just click on that link, bookmark the page (or grab the RSS feed), and you’ll never have to hear about Federal regulations for EHR funding again.

Who are these people?

The info.rmatics blog is a collaborative effort by a team of healthcare, IT and software development fanatics from Beacon 16 Software. Beacon 16 started at as the Informatics Solutions Group at Children’s Hospital in Boston, part of the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, and remains focused on developing new tools to enable collaboration in the worlds of research and clinical practice. At the core, we like to work on translational projects that will have a real impact on the broader community. In the past we’ve worked on Personal Health Records for large employers, policy issues for Health IT standards, and put together conferences on innovate personal healthcare technology. Right now, we’re working on large scale collaboration tools, new ways to visualize information across a research enterprise, and better ways to actually build software in a regulated, healthcare centric environment. For the software process folks, that means “Agile in Healthcare” – for everybody else, it means faster, better, cheaper and safer.

William Crawford, MS MBA is the CEO of Beacon 16 Software and was the founding Director of the Informatics Solutions Group from 2007-2010. He was previously a policy staff member at the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, and before that was Chief Technology Officer of Invantage, Inc., a venture-backed software startup focused on the pharmaceutical industry. He’s the co-author of Java Enterprise in a Nutshell, J2EE Design Patterns, and Java Servlet Programming, all from O’Reilly & Associates. He can be reached at william.crawford (AT) gmail.com.

Jonathan Abbett, MA is the Lead User Experience Designer at Beacon 16 Software. He’s also the man behind The Kosher Blog.

Steven Boscarine is also a Principle Software Engineer at Beacon 16, and hasn’t provided a bio yet. He’s a contributor to the JBoss Weld project and active in open source Java.