Thought Leadership

Perhaps it was the Ides of March or some other phenomenon (March Madness is already reserved for another event starting today) that spurred a flurry of activity in Congress this week…we at Octo are tracking movement on several key pieces of legislation moving through Congress that have significant implications for our clients in the Federal IT community.

Continuing day 2's deep dive into SPARQL, we began day 3 talking about inference and the value of property paths. In the semantic web, by defining transitive properties, you can establish relationships across subjects. Consider the heirarchy:

Wednesday’s session was all about deep diving into SPARQL. The SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) is a query language and protocol for RDF. SPARQL protocol describes a means for conveying SPARQL queries to an SPARQL query processing service and returning the query results to the entity that requested them. A SPARQL query processing service (endpoint) accepts queries and return results over HTTP. The fact that there is only one protocol for SPARQL is a huge advantage for semantic web, making it easier for people to connect to data sources using non-proprietary means.

The most important take away from Tuesday's session was truly understanding how Semantic Web Techonlogies can be applied to improve health care interoperability. Particularly speaking, the advantage Semantic Web technologies provide in terms of identifying semantic equivalances in terms of health care data such has within clinical trials. To better understand this we need to define what semantic equivalencies are and what they mean in terms of clinical trials.

Octo set out this week to figure out a path to solve a problem that is simple to explain but difficult to achieve. We call it a "End-to-End Use Case." The challenge is to find a way to discover "semantically equivalent" data that has been collected in multiple studies. Traditionally, this is a relatively straight-forward task if done pre-study (although it requires considerable "top-down" governance), but very difficult once a study has been "designed" and executed.

Octo is thrilled to announce a Semantic Web three day “hackathon”, (February 19th - 22nd),  featuring guest Eric Prud'hommeaux from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) . Eric's role in the Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLS IG) is why we called upon him. While Semantic Web is a non-domain specific technology, we are deeply interested in how Semantic Web technologies can assist in the areas of healthcare and health research.

I suspect that OCTO is not the only consultancy whose clients are urging us to be more “agile” in our delivery. As much as the term is used these days in myriad contexts, I suspect agile means lots of different things to whoever is talking about it. For the kind of management consulting we do, the immediate question is, “Isn’t agile a software development method?” The corollary questions is, “Does agile apply to non-software projects?” Interestingly the answers to the questions are likely yes and yes.

What Can We Expect on the Healthcare IT Landscape in the Next Four Years?
Observations and Speculations

The three-day mHealth summit has concluded.  The conference focuses on larger “mobility” picture including issues with connectivity as it relates to global health rather than solely focusing on mobile applications.  There is a wide variety of people in attendance including payers, providers, doctors, consultants, government, country representatives, and of course, vendors.  Here are some of the highlights from what we took from the conference:

The 1105 Government Information Group sponsored the 10th Annual Enterprise Architecture Conference.  The Expo attempts to bring together chief enterprise architects, CIOs, and program managers from across federal civilian agencies, the Department of Defense and state and local organizations, as well as industry to, as they put it, “discuss the critical application of EA methodologies to today’s top government prior