The Research Triangle area of North Carolina is named for three world-class universities that form a triangle of academic and research excellence: University of North Carolina (UNC), Duke University, and North Carolina State University. We’re lucky at IntraHealth International that our headquarters falls right in the middle of them. I came to IntraHealth in the fall of 2013, after 20 years at UNC, in part to figure out how to engage these...

When a country uses the iHRIS software to manage their human resources for health, they sometimes get a bonus. iHRIS can provide data connections that offer unexpected benefits for the managers and leaders of a health care system. Sometimes, just comparing data between iHRIS and another system can save money—a lot of money. But it takes some detective work. Oh, not the kind that involves trench coats and fedoras. The kind that takes patience and...

At the Global mHealth Forum in December, one session stood out to me in substance and approach: it was on a collaborative effort called OpenHIE . Skipping over all the technical parts of the acronym, OpenHIE is a set of technologies that allows data systems to talk to each other. In my line of work, the data systems are registries: lists of clients, health workers, and health facilities. Each registry uses the same terms (ideally) to share data...

A couple of months ago, Dykki Settle walked into my office. He had been talking with colleagues at mPowering Frontline Health Workers about marshaling a response to the Ebola outbreaks in West Africa—perhaps creating webinars and an online information resource for health workers. Now, I played a minor role in the online training response to the anthrax attacks in 2001. I could sense that the job was larger than anyone else understood at that...