(This is a re-post of a 25-year-old entry from a long-since retired blog called 'The Buddha Nature of Software'. The topic came up in a conversation with a colleague today about how to present they whys and wherefores of our service-mesh architecture to smart business people in our monthly business-facing technology forum. Still seemed relevant, … Continue reading On Folk I.T.
Is Identity in our DNA?
I had the opportunity to do an encore presentation at work of "Informational Identity: Digital Identity in Context," which I originally presented at Identity Week America in Washington, D.C. on September 11th. At Identity Week I presented, and expanded on, the idea of 'Informational Identity,' of which digital identity is a proper subset, and which … Continue reading Is Identity in our DNA?
Making the Case for Consumer Experience Improvements in Healthcare
In a recent IT leadership meeting, someone asked how we get our CFO and other leaders to prioritize work that improves consumer experience (CX) but does not have an associated hard ROI. Business leaders are obviously genuinely interested in driving those CX improvement efforts and are well aware of the challenges in prioritizing them. The … Continue reading Making the Case for Consumer Experience Improvements in Healthcare
The Moment of Conception
It's that time of year, for those of us whose fiscal year and calendar year align, to start talking about strategic technology asks for next year. To play the portfolio optimization game well we - the architects we - need to produce high level solution designs and close cost and resource estimates for each project … Continue reading The Moment of Conception
CONQUER Part 4: Software Morality
As we've described in this CONQUER series (Part 1, Part 3), distributed systems are information tools enabling volitional entities in relationships of permission and obligation to achieve their intents via purposeful dialogs, communicated among software components proxying their wills, consisting of imperative, declarative, and interrogative sentences: commands, queries, and events. Let's briefly consider the nature … Continue reading CONQUER Part 4: Software Morality
On Technical Debt, Strategic Windows, and the Ragged Front of Technology Evolution
Technology evolution has a ragged edge. The onus is on us - the back office architects and engineers - to bind the old and the new, the static and the in-progress, into a whole cohesive enough to provide continuity to the business we serve
IBM’s Spin Off: A Window on Key Architectural Factors for the Coming Decade
It’s being called a ‘spin off.’ But this is not like a glacier calving. IBM is splitting in two. One part will continue to be ‘IBM’, focused on hybrid cloud and AI. The other part, called ‘NewCo’ for now, will focus on managing client-owned infrastructure. This is an incisive and courageous move by IBM. Understanding … Continue reading IBM’s Spin Off: A Window on Key Architectural Factors for the Coming Decade
On the Tsunami of Consumer Health Apps Headed Our Way
[It is now June 2024, nearly four years since I wrote this post. Talk about a swing and a miss! In practice there are very few software applications actually using Patient Access APIs - not the tsunami I saw in my crystal ball. I need to do a post-mortem to figure out how I - … Continue reading On the Tsunami of Consumer Health Apps Headed Our Way
How to Comply with the HIPAA Individual Right of Access in your ONC Cures Act-mandated FHIR APIs
In my last post, I spoke to our need to handle sophisticated consent cases ONC Cures Act API compliance for 1/1/21, including patient representatives of various kinds. The mandate has de-scoped data segmentation and redaction for sensitive conditions, as too big a lift for the industry, leaving APIs to deliver all scoped data or none … Continue reading How to Comply with the HIPAA Individual Right of Access in your ONC Cures Act-mandated FHIR APIs
Your ONC Cures Act APIs and Managing Consent as Policy
The ONC Cures Act final rule is forcing payers and providers to come to grips with automating consent management and enforcement for data access. The best architectural solution to address it is Policy Based Access Control, or PBAC. PBAC is a kind of Attribute-Based Access Control, or ABAC. Unlike Role-Based Access control, in which a … Continue reading Your ONC Cures Act APIs and Managing Consent as Policy
Health IT Architect 