Mariya Cherneykina

I imagine my cloud as an omnipresent personality akin to the Skittles cloud…because Skittles. Yum!

Perhaps because I’m a millenial, I can’t really remember a world before Information Technology and, namely, Internet were synonymous with oxygen. In high school, a sociology teacher gave an interested few of us copies of “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. When I was reading the book, I remember thinking that none of the “flatteners” Friedman…[Read more]

The four major web services provided by Amazon are:
1. Simple Storage Service- A storage service that allows users to use Amazon servers to store and retrieve information remotely
2. Elastic Compute Cloud – A service similar to simple storage service except, with the capacity to scale up or down the amount of space and computing capacity used…[Read more]

As mentioned in the very last sentence of the reading, in the case of Wyeth especially, “IT in many ways became the business lingua franca of globalization.” This point stood out particularly when they mentioned the difficulty in tasks such as making sure the spelling for a particular drug is the same in all data entered in different countries.…[Read more]

Kristen,

One of the best lessons I got in medical school is to blame everything on policy. There are things you simply cannot do and it is impossible to explain to some people why, for example, you won’t give a confrontational drug addict more pain meds.When you say something is hospital policy, people tend to understand that there’s a larger…[Read more]

Diane,

Let me preface this comment by first saying that I love my furry felines as children, but I find it very sad that they often receive much faster, better, and as you mentioned, integrated care than my human child. We use a VSEC hospital for major emergencies and their records system is fast and flawless. I never experienced an unnecessary…[Read more]

David,

As it happens, our medical school had a “demo” yesterday for the EMR systems we will have to use during our rotations. While for most of my classmates it seemed like an irrelevant 20 minutes wasted in lieu of boards preparation, I was paying careful attention to the discussion. There seem to be a lot of different programs that are not…[Read more]

Mori,

Thank you for your comments. You brought up the important leadership point hammered in “The Leadership Challenge”: inspire a shared vision. If Matulovic is able to inspire this vision in at least his executive colleagues, then inevitably, they would pass it onto their team members.

Having worked as a medical practice administrator during the EMR selection process, I saw first hand how difficult it is to make IT decisions as a small business. It was an extremely difficult selection process, because much unlike Cinderella, there was no good fit with any of them. Therefore, it was also often a big gamble. Many EMR companies did…[Read more]

The most obvious example of systems thinking that came immediately to mind for me was science. More specifically, a discipline like medicine hinges on systems thinking and the interconnectedness of many constituent parts of a complex whole. Although this is intuitive to understand, I would argue that both reductionism and holistic thinking are…[Read more]

The new priority process for selecting projects is an interesting solution to the organizational problems at VWoA. The stronger aspect of the system is the fact that there is a framework for selecting projects and several levels of selection. This process eliminates favoritism or battles within the leadership as to which project to prioritize. All…[Read more]

Thanks!

Thank you for the clarification!

Eric,

You mentioned having an embarrassing experience where you were handed a project that ultimately impacted another project. Was the lack of communication attributed to you not being given the full information on the project or was it more of a lack of communication between leaders in terms of priorities? I would imagine that in the former…[Read more]

I think the issue here is less of a budget or priority management systems, but rather a leadership issue. I imagine this scenario occurs frequently in many sectors of a business or company, given that funds are never limitless for any activity. Playing favorites would lead Matulovic down a slippery slope for. First, it would show other executives…[Read more]

Professor Johnson,

I’m not sure if it is made explicit elsewhere so please excuse me if I’m overlooking something, but I’m not sure where to find the readings pertaining to the first case analysis. Are you referring to the reading for week 2 as the reading on which we should do our analysis?

Thanks Jordan! I think we’re imagining a rating system along the same lines, with only the trusted third party knowing the personal information that it uses to produce a rating. Sort of like when we get a credit score. If I told you my score, you would know about my general credit behavior, but wouldn’t know about specific bills I forgot to pay on…[Read more]

Dan,

I’m pretty sure we used an app like Star Walk to cheat in astronomy class at NYU. In our defense, NYC smog and bright lights (and being on a roof in the winter) were not really conducive to learning. As far as Epocrates, I couldn’t agree with you more. We were all told that it was the golden standard and to download it on our phones…[Read more]

Dan,

Very interesting observation, especially given what the Times piece says. Intuitively, I would have to say that it’s probably a combination of the platform design and the marketing surrounding the apps. For instance, the first time I heard of pintrest, it was on a news piece discussing its usefulness for a stay-at-home entrepreneur mom. At…[Read more]