Features Healthcare

In 2019, a cyberattack rattled the University of California, San Francisco, exposing just how vulnerable even the most sophisticated research institutions can be. For most people outside the walls of academic IT, that kind of event might have faded into memory. For Mandy Terrill, it became the starting point of a mission. Hired a few […]

At MedRisk, a managed care organization founded in 1994 and headquartered in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, maintaining a safe and supportive environment begins with a focus on people, security and culture. For Jeff Ericson, chief information security officer and senior vice president of infrastructure, that responsibility extends far beyond firewalls and servers. It stretches into every corner […]

The places where Agustin Ramirez has worked in IT may not fill an atlas, but they do make an intriguing list of locales. Ramirez was born in Venezuela and began his career in technology there as an engineer providing field support in the oil and gas industry before he left his country in 2006. First, […]

Ask Director of Information Technology Geoffrey Mason, and he’ll tell you that the people who work for Thomas Allen don’t do it for the money alone. There are no fancy perks like ping pong tables or kombucha on tap. Rather, for many who work at the Minnesota-based social-services company, which runs group homes and case […]

Science- and logic-minded since boyhood, Shawn Miller figures he made the right choice long ago by opting for technology instead of, say, chemistry.  “Chemistry doesn’t change anywhere near the pace of infotech,” Miller muses. “H2O is always water, H2SO4 is always sulfuric acid, but there’s always something new in our field. It’s constantly evolving and […]

When Mike Towers was first asked to work in information security while with a biopharma company in 2008, he had no idea why. He’d been with the company for more than a decade occupying roles in technology and management. He was experienced with directing strategies for the company but didn’t have military or law enforcement […]

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indiana Department of Health would process 100,000 lab results each month. Within the first few months of the pandemic, that number jumped to 1.5 million. Unprepared to handle such volume, its system became overloaded and couldn’t perform as expected. “Things may have been operating perfectly before COVID, but everything […]

In the late ‘90s, Bassam El-Fahmawi and his wife spent a harrowing day in the hospital when their two-year-old daughter fell ill with a high fever. Despite his years of experience in the medical industry and having been a lab manager at Prince Fahd Bin Sultan Hospital in Saudi Arabia, he was relegated to the […]

Jeff Gautney was drawn to Rush University System for Health for its structure. Based in Chicago, the organization consists of a clinically integrated network of hospitals, an extensive medical group and a university. Gautney, the vice president and chief information officer, says this makes his work more interesting and complex. “When you add a thousand […]

Just building a website that offers health insurance coverage is challenging, says Will Kilbreth. “Members are not a monolithic block,” says Kilbreth, CIO for Community Health Options. “Some people are very engaged and you need to work hard with them. There’s also a large cohort that wants to sign up and then never hear from […]