Start up Software Company
Software developer at start up company
- did everything at the company
- everyone had shares
- did not want to sell what they could not deliver
- more support issues with start up
- easy to interact with other teams to satisfy external clients
- just sold software not hardware
- more involved with the rest of the company outside of development
Hardest Parts of Developing:
- Asking for releases too often
- End Product: People don't realize all of the time and work that goes into it.
- getting user to allow enough time for the finished product
You can be active with sales team and be a programmer. In fact, its very important to have tech-savvy people in sales to be realistic in terms of expectations.
It's very important to be able to find out what the clients want. That's the major difference between good companies and great ones. The key to making the software great was meeting with people that used the system.
Did you have more fun doing things with other people or programming?
She liked talking directly to clients, only developer who worked with other vendors, lot of give and take between different companies, you could do either in the company, did what you liked
What was the hardest part about sales?
It was reigning in the sales guys. Tough for them to learn that the client never goes away. The sales guys would push a lot, ask for a lot. You would drop everything to get one improvement done for a certain deadline, the sales guys would be happy but then ask you to do it again. There was a big disconnect from the sales dept and actual programming part.
Differences between External and Internal Clients
- Ethical Company
— Wouldn’t sell product to someone who didn’t need it
— Would point customers in the right direction even if their product wasn't the answer (go look at x, y, or z)
- Technical guys in sales
— You can be active with sales team and be a programmer talk with clients, find out lots of details and expectations.
—-Technical employees will usually run the pre-sales, because they can provide a set of more realistic presentation.
The technical team can be more involved and active in the sales process or they can just program in a dark corner.
Real Software Not Available:
A lot of the software companies have pre-programmed software, that does not actually have the features that it should actually have.
The companies use attractive girls and attractive software to sell their product, when in reality the features they advertise are not really there!
EPIC
Medical records system which collects information from all over and puts it in one central location. Allows for greater accessibility to particular records, and greater communication between different organizations. Large sets of data can then be analyzed and be put into statistics. i.e. How many patients with cancer type A have a particular pre-existing condition? This involved a huge amount of data processing and greater resources. 80% of the time it turned out well, 20% it didn’t.
How do you deal with changing data? What if a certain correlation between condition and symptom is changed? Is that data now worthless?
Statisticians have to analyze raw data and change it by hand. It is a tedious process but important because it allows analysts to continue using past information.
Health care is moving in a direction towards outcomes data. This involves taking different sets of Q's & A's from patients, taking all of that data, and based outcomes on it
give medicare outcomes
MyChart
System designed to figure out pre-existing conditions before patient comes in. The Clinic attracts patients from all over the country and internationally as well, it is important to know important details before they arrive. You wouldn't want a patient to come all the way from two states over for a CAT Scan only to find out that their pacemaker prevents them from taking one.
MyChart acts as a questionnaire to find out anything the doctors should know before the patients arrival. It may be a bit of a nuisance for the patient, but it is very useful for the clinic.
Anecdotal story about the West Virginia lady without shoes and teeth in the parking lot proves the diversity of the Clinic's patients.
Questions and Answers
With medical records, how do you deal with people who have a whole record?
At the clinic, the policy does not allow for paper records anymore. All of the data is digital so there is no need to deal with physical records. Not all of it is in the system yet, so they still are going through the process of digitizing records. The amount of space involved with these is massive, it will take a long time to finish the job.
What about paper records which are already recorded in the system? Are those destroyed?
Yes, they don’t get rid of anything. It would be a big legal danger to delete physical copies of medical records.
What's the average size of a medical image?
Not sure average size of space, huge amounts of data and processing required. Terabytes of data.
Is compression used to make the data more manageable?
Compression does occur to save some space, other methods used to save space.
Advice - Health care IT is a great place to be