Drupal’s “premier conference” is quickly approaching. This Drupal conference is known as DrupalCon and will be held in San Francisco from April 19-21, 2010. As with previous years, the unofficial theme of the conference is to “learn about all things Drupal”. If the conference sessions aren’t enough, the schedule is also packed with plenty of development, documentation, and training events that are being held the days prior to and following the conference.

Presently over 1500 people have signed up to attend the conference. The price of attending a DrupalCon has always been reasonably priced which is one of the reasons this conference always sees a high turnout rate. If you plan on attending the conference, I would urge you to buy your tickets to DrupalCon now. Procrastinators like me have been known to wait too long to register for this conference only to find out that the maximum number of available tickets for the conference has already been reached.

Also, CMS Report is proud to be a media sponsor for DrupalCon – San Francisco 2010. This is our first time we have sponsored a DrupalCon event and we’re excited to be helping out by promoting this event. While you can learn quite a bit about Drupal at this conference, the conference also gives you a chance to see and hear directly from the the open source community that is supporting Drupal. As a user of Drupal, it’s not just about the software that sparks our interest in DrupalCon but also the people in Drupal’s community we have come to know and appreciate.

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So I missed the keynote due to a conference call that was not to be missed.  I also realized that coffee is going to be a battle in lines.  Luckily I had heard those rumors and planned ahead and brought chocolate covered espresso beans.

To kick things off, I’m going to listen to the Governor of Vermont, Jim Douglas.  He is going to be talking about how HIE (Health Information Exchange) is important for the States in their interactions with the Federal Government.  Let’s see what I can learn.

• (This is a little more like a speech, with a healthy political bent, than I would have liked. Will likely lead to less notes.)
• Wants to turn patients into consumers of their own health information.
• Vermont uses health teams centered around the Primary Care Physician (PCP) to break down silos of information at different locations.
• (A lot of examples of WHY to go electronic and have interoperable information.  Vermont seems to be making some solid strides in that direction, but I suspect that many here already are sold.)
• Federal and State officials, providers, insurers, vendors, and patients need to all work together to make HIE work.
• What will work in one state may not work everywhere.  Same applies to physicians.  Need to maintain flexibility on the details.
• Long-term funding for information exchanges is important after the recovery money runs out.
• Health IT is not the end, but the means to the end. (Obvious, but important to reinforce)
• Vermont has a 0.2% assessment on insurance claims to assist with sustainable funding for HIE.
• State lines cannot demarcate HIE as hospital systems and patients don’t stay in one state. (Where I live in DC metro, we have Virginia, Maryland, and DC, so this is an important point.)

Enough of the Q&A as I need sustenance.  Heading to a pair of Federal Health Community Synergy Sessions next.

Disclaimer

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

This is going to be a busy week for me.  I am off to HIMSS 2010 in Atlanta for a two primary reasons (and about a thousand secondary).  The first is to support my Healthcare colleagues from Washington Consulting at the conference.  The second, which will make the first all the more challenging, is to learn more about the vertical that is Healthcare IT.

Before I jump into it, a funny little joke.  When I was in a meeting and we were talking about the trip to HIMSS, someone mentioned HL7. Being one of many new terms to me, I didn’t ask them what it meant, just glanced at them with a curious look on my face.  They told me, and I kid you not, Look it up later. Just remember that there is no HL6 or 8.  Thanks for the help guys. ( I did learn what it was later and actually understood the “7″ reference.)

Haven’t I Heard This Before?

So as I did research to get ready to hit the ground running, I saw a lot of challenges that the Healthcare industry is facing on the IT side.  I had heard most of it from a high level before in news reports and in Information Management/ECM case studies.  I had also picked some information up in planning for this year’s AIIM CMIS Demo.

When you strip out the names of the federal mandates and the acronyms that are common in the industry, I saw a lot words that I understood quite well:

• Interoperability: The Interoperability Showcase is a big piece of HIMSS.  I understand this problem from Content Management.  In fact, as you may have noticed, this is one of my favorite topics to discuss.  Between AIIM’s iECM Committee and all my efforts with CMIS, I think I understand the core needs well.
• Standards: Very related to interoperability, but separate.  There are several standards out there for Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Electronic Medical Records (EMR), not to mention other standards in the Healthcare space.  How do you evaluate those standards for usability, adoption, and sustainability?  Once again, not that much different from the evaluations of CMIS and the ECM standards before that.
• Legacy Paper Records: Wait a second, this I know. You have all these patient records in paper format.  You need them in your EMR and EHR systems.  New records may be electronic, but a patient’s medical history from pre-electronic days needs to be part of the integrated whole.  Scanning of those records, capturing key data elements, and making them available is the same thing we’ve been doing for years just about everywhere.
• Records Management: How long do you keep a patient record?  How do you manage it?  What about records about maintaining hospital equipment?  This is the same problems that federal agencies and companies dealing with SOX compliance have been solving, or attempting to solve, for years.
• Privacy: This is very important.  You don’t want a patient’s health information being compromised.  That is the most personal of your information.  Information needs to be secure, yet shared, all at the same time.  Once again, this is not a new problem.  In the federal government, information about citizens are stored and used all the time.  Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is a source of a lot of auditing and control in many systems.  Even the exact queries that people use to retrieve information needs to be tracked and reported upon.

You know something? Maybe I know a little something about Healthcare IT after all.

Wandering, Learning, and Posting

So I am going to be attending sessions and talking to people for five days down in Atlanta.  I am hoping to define the size of the gap in my domain knowledge, and work towards filling that gap.  I am also going to post notes from some sessions in a similar fashion to my EMC World posts.  I will throw in the following disclaimer:

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

If you find anything of interest in these posts, and are at HIMSS, feel free to reach me on Twitter (@piewords).  I’m looking for people to talk to that will expand my knowledge and deepen my understanding of the Healthcare industry.

Like all industries, there are unique challenges and environments in Healthcare IT.  Like all industries, when you look at the core of the Information Management problem, you see similarities across the board, and lessons that can be brought to bear to solve them.

Going to be quite a ride this week. Stay tuned to see how I fare.

This year's KM World Conference &
Exhibition has moved to Washington, D.C. It will be November 16 – 18, 2010 at Marriott Renaissance, The Enterprise
Search Summit 2010 will be at the New York Hilton on May 11-12. It is nice to see these two conferences on the East
Coast. I went last year in the November to the combined
conference in San Jose.

I will be presenting at the Enterprise Search
Summit 2010 with my Darwin Colleague, Thierry Hubert. We are presenting on Deriving Order From Chaos Through Discovery and
Awareness. Our session is on Wednesday May 12 at 1PM. The Enterprise
Search Summit says that the “emphasis for Enterprise Search Summit is on how enterprise
search enables Information Access. Search can no longer be viewed as a
stand-alone application. It is increasingly part of everything we do and has
become the de facto gateway to information in the enterprise.” I would
certainly agree.

The KM World announcement said that this year's
theme is KnowHow: the Knowledge-Driven
Enterprise. “The knowledge of how to do something smoothly and
efficiently with technical skill and expertise — also known as
"knowhow" — drives every enterprise, agency, and organization.
Creating knowledge bases, sharing them effectively, using them for
decision-making and innovation.”

This sounds familiar but it is great that it is
still very relevant. The session shave a 2.0 flavor like last year. I hope to
be able to attend. Deadline for speaker submissions is March 1. Here are my notes
from the combined event KM World and Enterprise Search Summit last year.

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Resetting the Enterprise With 2.0 Collaborative
Tools

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: The Role of Social Techniques in Search &
How It Impacts Your Organization

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Evolve From a Tactical E-Discovery Approach to
Search and E-Discovery

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Enterprise Search Technologies

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Fundamentals of Enterprise Search

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: From Birth to Billions: The Life Story of
Google Enterprise Search

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Is Semantic Technology Real?

The Gilbane Group is gearing up quickly for another one of their conferences. The Gilbane Content Management Conference in San Francisco will be held May 18-20, 2010. This year’s conference will cover a number of topics including Web technologies, content management, and collaboration tools.

Web, content, and collaboration technology have reached a new level of maturity. This is true in terms of technology, but more importantly, it is true in terms of what businesses expect to be able to do with these tools. Web and enterprise content management permeate every aspect of an organization. Public facing internet sites are the front door to an organizations’ products and services, and where customers, partners and investors engage with the corporate brand and develop perceptions. Internal websites, whether in the form of intranets, blogs, wikis, or portals, provide knowledge workers increasingly efficient ways to collaborate and share knowledge. Customer and internal-facing applications share requirements that call for a number of enterprise content, publishing and infrastructure technologies, such as multi-lingual, social media, search, and integration software.

Gilbane San Francisco is organized into four tracks so that whether you are responsible for marketing, IT, a business unit, or an internal function, you will be able to easily navigate among the conference sessions. The four tracks include:

• Customers & Engagement
• Colleagues & Collaboration
• Content Technology
• Content Publishing

CMS Report is proud to be a media sponsor for Gilbane San Francisco 2010. If you plan on going to the conference, CMS Report has some good news that is going to save you some money. Our sponsorship of the conference entitles CMSReport.com readers to receive a special $200 discount to the conference. To receive the $200 discount, you’ll need to use the code “cmsreport” when you’re asked for it during the registration process.

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Mark your calendars for the 2010 Cascade Server User’s Conference taking place on Monday September 13, and Tuesday, September 14.

This video was used to open the Mark Logic 2009 User Conference. It’s an amazing presentation that tells the story of humans and the paradigm-shifting information explosion we find ourselves in today. When the video ended, the crowd went wild with applause. I’ll have to admit, I’ve never seen such response from an audience, not even to a great presentation delivered by a human opening keynote presenter.

Watch the video and let us know what you think.

And, consider attending the Mark Logic 2010 User Conference, May 4-6, 2010 in San Francisco.

London, 2 February 2010 – The 2nd PoweredbyCloud 2010 and the first international Cloud Law Summit taking place in London over three days, 8-9-10 February 2010 has attracted a wide international audience, particularly from the enterprise sector (www.poweredbycloud.com).

The PoweredbyCloud conference has established a reputation for providing strategic insight into the evolution of cloud services and business models that work.  With a speaker academy comprising of experts and front line players from Europe and North America, the event is positioned as the key content platform for providers and users.

In addition to the 2-day content driven conference, a special summit will focus on emerging Cloud Law will draw on experts from the US and Europe to discuss the implications of the Patriot Act in the United States, and EU Data Directive for enterprises.  Other topics covered included Privacy in the Cloud, Open Law, financial services, Cloud content and liability, negotiating contracts for Cloud Services, and how Cloud law might be framed in future.

“What emerges from this important conference in terms of creating a commercial and technological perspective of cloud services and infrastructure in Europe will be of key interest to enterprises,” commented Philip Low, managing director at BroadGroup, the conference researchers and producers. “The added dimension of how potentially a wide range of cloud issues will be treated legally represents the first such initiative across the region, and is also being observed from Brussels to Tokyo.” 

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Last week I attended the Gilbane Conference in Boston and have finally found a few minutes to blog about it, we exhibited and I was invited to speak in a couple of sessions and as I’d been contributing to the ‘back channel’ through Twitter (#gilbaneboston) I thought I’d expand on some of the those thoughts.
First [...]

Last year, AIIM’s iECM Committee put together a demonstration of the proposed CMIS 1.0 standard for the AIIM Conference in Philly.  Well, we are at it again for a bigger and better demo.

How is it going to be better?  I am glad you asked.  Here is what we are aiming for this year:

• More vendors:  Last year we had three vendors (Alfresco, EMC, and Nuxeo) participating.  This year we already have four vendor commitments and we haven’t started groveling for more participants yet!
• More CMIS scenarios:  Last year we only showed CMIS in the Federation scenario.  This year we are going to be showing TWO Federation scenarios AND, as a bonus, an Application to Repository scenario.  That’s right, we are going to be switching our front-end application between the different repositories ON THE FLY!
• Real-world use cases: Okay, maybe not “real” world, but we are going to be using the Health Care Industry as a basis for this year’s demonstration.  Our meta-data model and use cases will focus on the management of content of a patients health care record.  Things will be simplified, this is a CMIS demo after-all, but you will be able to see a real-world application for CMIS that doesn’t involve a generic ECM interface.
• CMIS Version 1.0: This is really just for me.  Last year everything was draft this and beta that.  I’m expecting a much more streamlined development process this year.

You want more?  How about this…there is going to be a session on the demo at the AIIM Conference this year presented by myself and Thomas Pole, the iECM Committee Chair talking about the demo and a whitepaper that will be developed in conjunction.

In the next few days, you will see a more detailed description of this year’s demonstration and a whitepaper that Thomas and I have written about the status of the standard, the story of last year’s demo, and what we are planning for this year.

Exciting times people, exciting times.