HITLAB

Product Design & Development

“I’m not an artist or very creative” is something I hear quite often when working with clients coming with a product idea. However, we all are quite creative if given the chance and with the help of some simple tools. I brought to HITLAB a number of tools to help unlock creative insights and during our Design Sprints or Workshops, we have helped a number of our clients ideate and design different products including mobile health applications to more complex patient support services.

During a design workshop we often use Value Proposition and Business Model Canvases, User Story Mapping, Persona development to develop a shared understanding of the product or service. These tools helped develop the UX for a large reproductive health study, a “beyond-the-pill” patient support service, a enterprise management platform, and mobile applications.

Digital Health Strategy

Leveraging my experience as a IT Director, I joined in a larger Digital Health Strategy project for a Global Pharmaceutical Company. The goal was to understand the current digital health capabilities throughout the North America operation, identify any gaps and make near and long-term actionable recommendations. The project consisted of numerous interviews with business unit leaders across the operation as well as in depth engagement with their Information Services and Procurement teams.

The resulting report identified recommendations including improving UX issues with existing web properties, expanding the use of Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS), improving how information is captured to assist in reducing overspend or duplication of information technology spending.

Information Security Management

Information Security Management (ISM) is not the most exciting topic, but from a business operation perspective it is critical to minimize business risks from information loss. ISO/IEC-27001 is a recognized standard for implementing an information security management system (ISMS) that takes into account an organizations context and risk profile.

In healthcare, ensuring the security of protected health information (PHI) and/or personally identifiable information (PII) is paramount (and governed by federal, state and local regulations). I used ISO/IEC-27001 to guide the implementation of ISM policies and controls to reduce the risk of exposure and to provide simple audit mechanisms to reduce the potential for information loss.

 

Harlem RBI

IT Infrastructure

In fall of 2015 Harlem RBI opened the new DREAM Charter School building, a 65,000 sq. ft. space dedicated to K-8 eduction and Harlem RBI’s administrative operations. In the summer of 2015, I managed the IT infrastructure fit out of the space.

Fit-out included the design and implementation of the IT architecture (LAN, WLAN, WAN, VOIP, fiber), managing vendor relations, coordinating with architects, design engineers, and project managers to keep the IT portion of the project on track.

The IT team installed most of the IT equipment, setup the all the network equipment, phone system, IP speaker/PA system, bell schedule and ensured that the facility was secure. Time was tight, we had about 6 weeks from receipt of the occupancy certificate to the first day of school. Infrastructure included Cisco Catalyst 4500 switches, Fortinet security devices, Aerohive access points, Asterisk VOIP phone system, HP servers.

Cloud Services (Box and Okta)

The beauty of using cloud services is the ability to work any where and at any time. For a non-profit with multiple locations in East Harlem and the South Bronx, the staff were often prevented from accessing critical content because they could not access Harlem RBI’s on-premises file shares. An early goal and an early win was to migrate the organizations content to Box. The enterprise edition gave Harlem RBI the proper controls to effective manage the all the content and ensure that our users could work effortlessly.

Recognizing that more and more services would be moved to the cloud, early on there was a recognition to manage security credentials across multiple cloud platforms. During the Box migration, we also selected Okta as our Single Sign-On (SSO) provider. For the IT team it made provisioning and de-provisioning user access a breeze and for our end-users, SSO reduced complexity and even allowed our Mac users to easily change their Active Directory passwords.

 

Regenstrief Institute / AMPATH Kenya

Global Health & Information Technology

AMPATH is an academic medical partnership between a number of North American academic health centers and the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital based in Eldoret, Kenya. AMPATH as a program seeks to provide comprehensive HIV care services through its three-way mission: care, research, and training; It currently serves 3.5 million people, with over 60 urban and rural clinics across Western Kenya.

In 2012, the AMPATH ICT team worked along side Inveneo to construct a large scale Wireless Wide Area Network to connect 20 major clinic sites that covered the majority of AMPATH’s catchment area. The project involved working with Kenyan Government agencies (Ministry of Health, Kenyan Communications Commission, Kenya Civil Aviation Authority) and a number of private companies to secure equipment and tower space to mount our wireless radios.

I worked with the team and most of the parties involved to secure the necessary permission and rights of way as well as develop the project rationale. The collected effort provided WAN and Internet connectivity to the 20 sites and allowed for the rapid movement of electronic health data across the sites.

Core IT Infrastructure (network)

AMPATH’s network infrastructure was originally built using low-end unmanaged layer-2 switches. The network was flat and not segmented. Early on, this proved not to be a issue, but as the program experienced rapid growth, the original architecture could not keep up.

Through a successful grant application, we were able to secure the funding necessary to completely upgrade AMPATH’s network to a level equal to what North American Health Centers. I worked closely with HP Kenya to identify and procure the proper hardware, worked the request through the Kenyan tender process, defend the solution to the governance board and then work with the ICT team to configure and install the hardware. Through the process, we were able to get member of the local team trained and certified in networking. Once the infrastructure was upgraded, users experienced a much more stable environment.

Strategic Planning

One goal I set for myself was to help the Kenyan ICT team organize their team and set in motion strategic goals and objectives to help address the needs of all folks working at AMPATH. A tall task if only because no other group at AMPATH had ever formally set down a strategic plan. In late 2010, we started simply by identifying the IT strengths and weaknesses, creating a vision and mission for the group and develop a set of high level goals that could be achieve in 2-3 years.

Before I left AMPATH, we held a follow-up workshop to both review how we succeeded in achieving our goals. There was cause for celebration in that we achieved around 70% of what we set out to do. The accomplishments were a signal of how hard everyone worked as team and with limited resources. The team were highly motivated to set new goals and be challenged to achieve more. In the follow up, we started moving forward to find new methods to get feedback from the larger organization and judge our success on how well the team solved problems.