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 author couldn’t decide whether he 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 casual visitor may be confronted with some content that is of fairly minimal interest. I’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.

You can read more about some of the topics I’m focused on in my Agenda for 2012.

Who am I dealing with?

My name is William Crawford, and I’m currently the CEO of Linked Medical, a semi-stealth mode healthcare informatics company, and principal of Beacon 16 Software, a technology consultancy. In the past, I’ve been a venture-backed CTO (at Invantage, Inc., later part of Perceptive Informatics), a policy staff member in the Office of the Administrator at the United States Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the director of the Informatics Solutions Group at Children’s Hospital Boston. The info.rmatics blog started out as a group blog written with some colleagues. It’s shifted a bit, and in late 2011 I decided to start blogging again and turned it into a person blog, since there was already a little Google juice in place for the domain.

As for early 21st century technical credibility, I’m the co-author of Java Enterprise in a Nutshell, J2EE Design Patterns, and Java Servlet Programming, all from O’Reilly & Associates and all effectively out of date. I can be reached at william.crawford (AT) gmail.com.

What about that other stuff on the site?

When this blog started, I had a few of my colleagues contributing content. That didn’t really work out, but there are some excellent posts – including some that are technically useful and show up on Google searches – so I’ve retained all the previous content.