A View from the CLOUD (Health 2.0 SF 2009): Conversations and Thoughts from Day One

San Francisco… 55 degrees… a vibrant morning for Health 2.0, and I’ve already had some interesting conversations about CLOUD before the program even starts.

On the way over from the hotel on the bus to the San Francisco Concourse and home of Health 2.0, I engaged in an interesting conversation with someone that has worked in health systems as a major contractor, and we got to talking about ALTA in the military and VISTA in the Veterans Administration, one with a great GUI and taxonomy but crashes, and the other using a more free text approach, more fluid yet harder to mine the data.

Of course, the irony is that regardless of the attributes of either system, they aren’t connected to each other, so if you serve in the military, then leave the force and become a veteran, the challenge of data silos in healthcare becomes the core issue and not the relative attributes of the two systems.  CLOUD and its focus on ME 1.0 means that all parts of the military healthcare system can work behalf of our dedicated soldiers and veterans and streamline the many disparate bits of data necessary to deliver the best possible and most effective care.