Tell me about yourself and the company.
I’m CTO and one of the founders of Cardamom Health. I’ve been in the healthcare IT ecosystem all my life. I was at Epic many years ago, then went to work for Microsoft in their Health Solutions venture. After that, at Nordic, and then then most recently and currently at Cardamom. I have a product, platform, and services end-to-end view of the world.
Cardamom is a data analytics and apps company. Our goal is to create this end-to-end focus as a company. A lot of organizations are great in certain verticals, but what it takes to drive change in healthcare is to use data, uncover insights, and use the insights to drive application and workflow optimizations. We as a company are doing that end to end. We are a two-and-a-half-year-old company and are making some amazing progress in this area.
How will health system technology change as the move to the cloud continues?
We can learn a ton from established verticals like finance, retail, and manufacturing. As a consumer, when I’m spending money online, the scale of cloud computing allows sub-second fraud detection when my credit card is misused, content personalization, and cybersecurity analysis. All these things are happening because of the scale of cloud computing. Healthcare can learn from some of those established verticals.
My prediction is that since we’re starting an early journey of a full-on cloud migration, we will eventually be able to see greater resilience in terms of things like disaster recovery and the kind of cybersecurity we can expect with a hyperscaler that has thousands of cyber engineers who are working on a cyber threat analysis.
Those are two specific examples, but also this model of hybrid cloud makes it easier to connect to each other. You’re on one hyperscaler, you want to move data to another hyperscaler, and the speed at which interoperability can happen. These are things that I expect in healthcare. My hope is also the amount of innovation, the speed of innovation, that will happen to launch a basic VM, test something, deploy, fail fast, and move forward. Innovation will be much faster.
There’s also a cultural aspect. Workforce needs will change. Some of the traditional reliance on on-prem — database management, network administration, and ETL management — some of it just goes away. Hopefully it is replaced with the need for somebody that is a lot broader in terms of cloud architecture, pure business analysts that can connect the different systems. Healthcare organizations will need to proactively manage that re-skilling and up-skilling in that hybrid cloud model.
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