Features May 2018

Plenty of pharmaceuticals are put to market with the promise of improving people’s lives. Rarer still, are the medicines good enough to actually save lives. With plazomicin, the San Francisco-based Achaogen is chasing the latter. A next-generation antibacterial, designed to treat a host of serious drug-resistant infections (a huge issue in hospitals), the drug proved […]

So much for the perception that instant communication is primarily a young person’s concern. Sure, the teens and millennials may be inseparable from their latest devices, but they’re not the only ones insisting on being wired for the moment. Just ask Robert Buckingham, the senior director of information systems at Presbyterian SeniorCare Network, whose responsibilities […]

Put yourself in the shoes and lab coat of a renowned scientist intent on curing Parkinson’s disease. So beckons Curtis A. Carver Jr., who’s on a first-name basis with such researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. And while Carver’s profession is directing info-tech, not biochemistry, he wants to be a partner in that […]

Canaries can be grateful to Industrial Scientific, the Pittsburgh company that long ago spared them the hazardous and involuntary duty of detecting toxic gases in coal mines. That gratitude can be shared by the countless men and women whose occupations carry them underground or anywhere else where the air might be tarnished by unhealthy and […]

Back in the early ‘90s, if you wanted to order promotional products through Geiger, you first needed to open the Yellow Pages, call an 800 number and wait a week for the company catalog. Once the wares were chosen—coffee mugs, let’s say—you’d connect with a sales rep through another 800 number. Place the order, snail-mail […]

Scott Blake doesn’t run up too large a bar tab on his Bangor Savings Bank credit card. Perhaps once a month he’ll treat members of his prized info-tech team to a beer at one of Bangor’s brew pubs. But that’s only when, at the end of a weekly vulnerability scan, there have been no causes […]

Yorck Haase has been in IT since what he calls the “dawn of the internet” in the early 1990s—back when, if you owned a PC, you were among the techiest of techies. It was the evolving nature and continuous emergence of new technologies that drew him in; he loved getting his hands into increasingly complex […]

You know the cyberthreats are out there, only you can’t see them. So you wait, praying your defenses hold up, building your walls ever-higher. It’s a view that has long been standard in cybersecurity circles, with institutions from hospitals to governments emphasizing their preparedness for the inevitable attacks. But what if hunkering down is no […]

IT departments have sometimes been seen as a sort of black hole: Requests go in and replies come back out—but not always a whole lot else. Especially in this fast-paced technological world—and especially in the rapidly-evolving health care industry—Mitzi Cardenas has set out to disrupt that role. As senior vice president, chief strategy and chief […]

It wasn’t Armageddon, or even Y2K. But that didn’t stop Ron Dinwiddie from breathing a sigh of relief as the clock struck midnight and all systems were a go. Calls and texts from colleagues in the field confirmed what the screens in front of him seemed to show: that the months of late nights and […]