With the US government calling for increasing usage of IT in healthcare, storing and exchange of health records in an electronic format is gaining momentum. Implementing appropriate electronic documentation management solutions in the areas of healthcare document management would help various entities in the healthcare domain transform healthcare information management departments.
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Healthcare providers are facing challenges when they try to expand the scope of services and cover a larger number of patients while 
simultaneously controlling costs. The highly regulated and supervised nature of the industry adds to the challenge that the providers face. Insurers and health administrators need to look closely at ways to create greater efficiency and effectiveness of care through focus on improved and consolidated IT systems, greater automation and self service capabilities besides combining it with labor cost reduction. This involves transforming the service delivery model for back office functions besides the core healthcare administration and operational functions and processes.
With the NACHA annual conference completed last week, people are ready to take the next steps forward. Changing the way consumers and merchants are doing business together is having a dramatic impact on the Payments industry at large. There’s more in play for this industry than the mobile focus, “target market” knowledge may be a big area where merchants need to tailor their IT initiatives. Banks and financial institutions need to heed all the research out there that concludes that a bank trying to offer a service to customers through the mobile internet without partnering is believed to be business model least likely to work
Professional Industry Perspectives from a Variety of Sources:
According to Patricia Hewitt in a Payment Journal Article “I sense now the Industry is ready to face its demons and has accepted the fact that the original payments business is no longer sustainable” She states “If King is right, and consumers want to save as much as they want to spend, then the foundations of the payment industry is being shaken to its core” from a conversation with Brett King, the keynote speaker at NACHA 2013.
In a story by Karen Webster on PYMNTS.com: Millennials vs. Boomers: Who Will Boost Consumer Spending? She states that the payments industry must be careful who they target. With much focus on the early adopter, highly enable mobile group called the Millenials ( people born between 1976-1995), the payments industry may not be targeting the group with the spending power. Karen discusses an article she read in Barron’s and makes this statement: “Milleninals probably won’t drive spending!”
From the CEO Series of PYMNTS.com: There is hope, CEO Keith James Stone from globalVCard paysystems states: “Market adoption. We’re dealing with legacy systems in most cases, retailers and merchants. It is an area that most people underestimate about innovating.” He also gives his advice as to what you can do to be great in this industry “Be fast, Be furious, Keep it simple and get to market quickly. Don’t over think things or build in a vacuum, get feedback from people who’ll use your app early on.”
Issues and Opportunities in the payments industry are abundant, Edgar, Dunn & Company’s 2013 Advanced Payments Report shows some interesting statistics regarding who will drive growth, what strategy they believe will be successful, and the success factors that will be key.
Diarmuid Mallon for ÜberMobile has written many articles about mobile retail payments, but in his newest article, “Mobile Commerce Isn’t Just About Payments”. He states “Mobile commerce is not just about a new way to make payments. It’s about an entirely different transaction medium. The mobile channel creates unprecedented opportunities for enterprises, merchants, brands and financial institutions to establish and maintain direct relationships with customers—and more customers than ever before.”
The article “Banks and financial institutions struggle with Partnering with Mobile Finance by Chris Skinner explains why banks are dragging their feet with regards to Mobile finance. Chris examines the challenge of taking a vertically integrated bank and breaking it into pieces that can be assembled as part of an alternative service, such as a mobile app. Mr. Skinner states, “That’s the extreme opposite of the end-to-end vertically integrated bank that owns the whole customer proposition, but this is exactly why banks are struggling with mobile banking models right now.”
This is but a glimpse of what is in store for the payments industry, we must view this sector from many angles to make the most of changes. It is our responsibility to continue to innovate to satisfy our customers and stakeholders. Partnering with a competent custom software development company will increase your ROI.
NACHA’s Payments Conference Overview by Patricia Hewett: Taking the Temperature at NACHA 2013 
Over the years, NACHA’s annual conference has become an important event for the larger payments industry and presents a wide cross section of the topics and issues the market is facing. This year’s conference kicked off with a keynote from Brett King, a recognized banking thought leader and a founder of Moven, a mobile-only bank account recently launched in the United States. His message to the industry is simple and clear: consumers are changing and if banks don’t change with them, they will die.
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Gaston Hiller wrote a 3 part series of articles on the MongoDB Open-source NoSQL Database/ Mr. Hiller is a Author for Dr.Dobbs.com one of the premier websites for software development companies and engineers. A Great source of the latest news and technologies available to the development community.
In his first Article: Getting Started with MongoDB he explains how to development of a MongoDB application in C#.
MongoDB is a widely used open-source NoSQL database (by some surveys, the most widely used). It offers a flexible, dynamic, document-oriented storage model that provides the high throughput and easy scalability required for projects with big data loads. MongoDB provides drivers and client libraries for the most popular programming languages, including C#. In this first article in a three-part series dedicated to developing a MongoDB application in C#, I explain what you need to know to set up and start working with MongoDB databases. In the next installment, I’ll begin looking at access with C#.
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During the three days of subcommittee hearings last week with the House Energy and Commerce Committees, mHealth was the main topic of 
discussion. This was highly unusual to hold three days of hearing on a single topic. This suggests that some within Congress are serious with moving forward on legislation impacting mHealth.
The Question is What is going to happen to the mHealth pioneers? Are they going to be restricted too much by the U.S. Government regulations to stop innovation? Innovation in this domain is the key to the best products and services available to doctors and patients, and they are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the mHealth products.
Cloud based testing offers several advantages including cost reduction using virtualized resources, easily leveraged shared cloud infrastructure 
and on-demand testing to conduct real time validation of performance and scalability parameters.
Cloud based testing tools and options
To run stress tests, drive load scenarios and measure the results, there are some viable options available in the cloud: SOASTA with its CloudTest solution for load testing and extreme stress testing; HP Load Runner in the Cloud running on EC2; JMeter in the Cloud, LoadStorm and BrowserMob.
Testing tools from Sauce Labs allow running Selenium tests on Web apps in the Cloud or manually testing the application against different cloud-based instantly available browsers. Crowd sourced testing services like uTest are available that allows organizations to avail of various types of testing including usability testing, functional testing, load testing and regression testing. Testing in the Cloud, especially load testing for Web applications using tools like Atlassian’s end-to-end hosted studio would save a lot of time and trouble for smaller organizations and offer significant scope for upfront cost savings.
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Adopt these DevOps practices to realize the goals of effective collaboration,
smoother operations, and cleaner code.
DevOps has become one of our industry’s most popular buzzwords. Yet, surprisingly, there is little consensus as to what DevOps means beyond the high-level vision of tighter and more effective collaboration between development teams and operations teams. While DevOps might mean different things to different organizations, there is an emerging core of best practices that further its goals of enhanced collaboration to produce better software. I examine these practices here. Fair warning, though, I’m not just looking at this issue from the point of view of developers.
I’ve listed these items in priority order, with later practices often depending on those that come before.
A fundamental philosophy of DevOps is that developers, operations staff, and support people must work closely together on a regular basis. An implication is that they must see one other as important stakeholders and actively seek to work together. A common practice within the agile community is “onsite customer,” adopted from Extreme Programming (XP), which motivates agile developers to work closely with the business. Disciplined agilists take this one step further with the practice of active stakeholder participation, which says that developers should work closely with all of their stakeholders, including operations and support staff–not just business stakeholders. This is a two-way street: Operations and support staff must also be willing to work closely with developers.
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The HiMSS 2013 Conference & Expo was AMAZING. The Exposition was 1.2 miles long! There were so many attendees. Yes, there were some 
big booths and there were some really small booths, and there was masses of attendee’s visiting us all! This is the largest Healthcare IT Conference and Expo in the World, and it showed!
This was Telliant Systems’ first HiMSS show. We decided to exhibit. And what a great decision, as we were able to fully experience the HiMSS13 exposition first hand. There was something at the Expo for everyone in the Healthcare IT sector, from software development to durable goods, and companies to help you staff your hospital, clinic or software development initiative.
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February, 2013, Johns Creek, GA: Metro Atlanta based Telliant Systems is proud to announce that it will be showcasing its outsourced software development services at the Healthcare Information and Management Society’s (HiMSS) 2013 Annual Conference and Exhibition to be held March 3-7, 2013 in New Orleans, LA at Booth #7643. HiMSS is one of the largest Healthcare IT conferences in the world and is the premiere event in the nation for sharing and advancing knowledge, technology and solutions in the ever changing landscape of healthcare. Attendance at HiMSS2012 topped 37,000, comprising of senior healthcare executives, and this year’s attendance is sure to be large with solutions being presented for the new regulations and requirements.
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