Friday, February 24, 2012

Quipstar

I don't usually post about my personal life or work here and I plan to keep it that way, but I thought I'd just post a few of these to let you know what's been keeping me busy and away from the blog for the last couple of weeks. Also, because it's fucking awesome.


The guy in the backwards baseball cap is my man Andy. He was in my old high school group and he got hired here shortly after I did.

What people have on their iPads is our software, live. It's sorta hard to tell but the same software is also running on the podiums. (Or rather, as it's a web-based app, on a server in the back room. The computers in the podiums themselves are mostly running Firefox, plus some stuff for the buzzers and whatnot.) It's a clinical documentation app with a ton of medical data in it. Contestants are using it to answer medical and medical coding questions.
"Inga" is an anonymous health IT industry news blogger. She's in disguise so that her secret identity isn't revealed. Her security detail is two of our programmers. Her martini glass is filled with green M&Ms because she's a diva. You'll notice we set up a whole extra big screen TV to her left so we could show a live video feed of her shoes.

I'm in this one. Set up the day before the convention opened.

Post-show inventory and office clean-up is probably going to eat up next week's computer and work time, and just recovering from Las Vegas (Medicomp parties even harder after the show than we do during it) is going to take most of this weekend, so don't expect me to be back to blogging and whatnot for a bit. 

6 comments:

  1. That's cool, but as someone who works in IT for a major hospital system I am totally against anybody who tries to put tablets in the hands of the medical staff. 'Cause, then, like, we have to support them, and I'm already on record that I would quit before I started coding all my existing base of apps and utilities for iOS/MacOS. ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm going to repeat: "Or rather, as it's a web-based app, on a server in the back room. The computers in the podiums themselves are mostly running Firefox, plus some stuff for the buzzers and whatnot."

    Trust me, we weren't stupid enough to want to put our software through the Apple store.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yeah, but even demoing web-based software on a tablet in our environment gets all the staff excited about getting a new toy (an iPad, not the vendor's software).

    ReplyDelete
  4. My point is that even if a hospital were crazy enough to try to actually implement this with iPads (expensive, not waterproof, hard to sterilize, fragile, not actually all that touch-sensitive...), what *you'd* need to worry about is what system the server runs on. In the only vendor that has a working implementation of this in the field right now (and that's ambulatory, not enterprise-- Epic and some other enterprise vendors use some of our data but not our new stuff, so we're at least 3-4 years out from Quippe in U.S. hospitals), that's Windows.

    Anyway, sorry to be prickly but I don't really want to get into a "Boooo! Apple!" thing right now. We're using iPads for our marketing because they're sexy and people get excited when you give out 20 a day at a convention.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I should probably note that after 3 weeks of having about 80 iPads scattered about the office I basically see them as chores and annoyances. All the sexy is gone for me personally. The part that I think is cool is that we built a friggin' gameshow! People kept coming up and asking who built it for us and where we got our emcee. "Nope, the podiums were built by that long-haired dude over there, and the emcee is our Senior Product Manager."

    ReplyDelete