By Sramana Mitra guest author Shaloo Shalini
SM: What you are saying here is bio medical researchers would benefit from solutions, SaaS maybe, which can take the hard technical side out and enable them to focus on what they are trained to do.
Let me ask you a follow-up question. If you were to give some guidance to entrepreneurs who come from the software service world and want to help provide that infrastructure to the bio medical research community, where would you suggest they begin that exploration? What fields of biomedical science are most active at the cusp of computational modeling and biosciences? >>>
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini
SM: What are the vendors that are involved in this process at HMS? What roles and responsibilities are the vendors playing, and how do you evaluate them and bring them in? What are some of your criteria for vendor evaluation?
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini
SM: While you manage the research infrastructure, are you also managing a lot of data that comes from these affiliated hospitals such as Massachusetts General or other partner hospitals? >>>
By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Shaloo Shalini and Bhavana Sharma
SM: That brings us to the final portion of this discussion where we focus on entrepreneurial opportunities in the cloud. You are managing not a $50 billion company, but you are managing a relatively large IT challenge. What are the main needs of your organization regarding cloud computing that you don’t find current vendors addressing properly? What are some of the entrepreneurial opportunities that you see ? >>>
By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Shaloo Shalini and Bhavana Sharma
SM: How concerned are you about securing and controlling your IT assets in the cloud?
DH: As in regard to what kind of assets do you to think will be in the cloud?
SM: Whatever is part of your cloud architecture. Let’s say you have all these analytics that are going to come on the cloud in short order. How do you secure data access when you have distributed users of analytics accessing from multiple touch points? Again, it’s a distributed security challenge right? >>>
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini
Healthcare and life sciences is a vertical that can gain tremendously from technological paradigm shifts such as cloud computing. Despite obvious deterrents in the form of data security and privacy, HIPPA, and the sheer volume of unstructured data in terms of storage, management, analytics and research, there is no dearth of opportunity for innovators and entrepreneurs who are looking to overcome challenges and create solutions to benefit not only the medicos but also researchers dealing with complex life science scenarios. >>>
By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Shaloo Shalini and Bhavana Sharma
SM: I believe that charge-back is interesting because it is helpful to the business; do you believe in that as well?
DH: I think that charge-back is helpful. Anything that can put cost data back to business to help us understand what it costs to do business is good. It is not just to keep IT budgets low. With charge back, business leaders understand the true cost of doing business – that’s what is really important. >>>
By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Shaloo Shalini and Bhavana Sharma
SM: Let’s talk about impact of cloud computing on the IT organization. How do you perceive the impact of cloud computing with reference to your technology strategic planning, its relationship with the rest of the organization and how is the relationship with technology vendors changing? Is the role of your IT team changing in the cloud environment? >>>