We interview Shaz Ahmad, Nextgate’s VP of Cloud Operations to find out why people don’t miss something until it’s gone.
It is 02.00am Pacific Time and this is the preferred hour of the day for Shaz Ahmad, in his T shirt, to handle an interview. He is a self confessed night owl, but I would’ve thoughts there are limits. For me, it is 10.am GMT and there could be no worse time to make a constructive assessment of why Nextgate’s time has come. I have told my office to hold my calls.
But Shaz is as eloquent as I am even in mid morning, and he needs to be. Nextgate identity management technology is the secret sauce that make your hospital data work, seamlessly, that you do not realise you ever needed, until something goes wrong. It is the one line of code you never appreciated, but which makes your data work. As they say in the song, isn’t it the way it goes, you never realise what you’ve got – until its gone.
Except that with Nextgate – the thing that you don’t “get” – is the problem that you’ve got. As we move more and more into a connected and multiple data source environment, where patients not techies are driving that source of data, so (to paraphrase). Hospitals increasingly cannot map or match the data that they have. In short, the HL7 data is neither clean from one source or another, nor do existing systems talk to each other. And whilst this is technical issue, the problem is commercial. Putting it right takes man hours and costs money.
Except that it doesn’t. And it comes through the decision of starting again, and putting your data on a cloud. What that means is, a cloud-based solution that does identity management, allows hospitals and organisations to rapidly and accurately deliver a patient record at the point of care – with the flexibility and scalability you need in today’s evolving and digital environment.
Shaz does not talk about technology. He talks about Service Level Agreements. He talks about peace of mind. The idea that you as a Hospital (say). can access all of your data, 24/7, safely on a cloud, without the need for local expert support. Amongst all of the solutions that a hospital might have, Nextgate is the single line that makes not just a difference – it is THE difference.
It is the reason why Shaz left his job at Orion, where he was a user of Nexgate technology, to take up an offer with the company that created the stuff.
Nextgate competes with the big IBM and Corporate Players in data integration. But it is addressing a real market need. The Obama driven “spine” of data accessibility mirrors the attempts in the UK to formalise data accessibility. Nextgate has reference sites and projects that are pan-Atlantic.
Yet it is a hard sell – what Nextgate are saying is; don’t wait until you have an issue before talking to us about our Cloud benefits. As they say in the song, – don’t lose sight of Paradise.
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