The Future Of Health Care IT Outsourcing Looks Promising

A recent research report from the Black Book Research Group claims that the IT payer outsourcing market will exceed $60 billion by the end of 2017. This is due to the demands on data security, benefits solutions and population health. The report was based on a survey that included data from more than 800 health plan IT outsourcing users from Q2 to Q4 2015. Trends were determined in the marketplace of service providers and client expectations. The report has predicted that there will be 40% growth in the next two years. This is due to the fact that better solutions in software has created faster IT expenses than expected with no increase in revenue. This is why outsourcing is now being offered to control organizational costs.

The report said that less than one in 10 of health plan IT executives  are considering  full or end-to-end off-shored solutions. However, the Black Book report was able to show that health plans are budgeting at least 20 percent increases in outsourcing spends for 2016 for service models and functions including application support, desktop support, and help desk support. Nearly 80 percent of larger health plans could turn to outsourced vendors for help desk support in the next 12 months, the survey found.

It is expected that security and privacy projects, and cloud initiatives will grow over 50% of all new outsourcing business initiatives for 2016 in managed care organizations. Payers will soon focus on three additional outsourcing areas by 2016: comprehensive software in core administration, care and network management, and constituent engagement. It expects that by 2018, half of all health plans will demand substantial risk sharing with their outsourcing providers as operational efficiency will become critical at four in 10 of the nation's small health insurers and plans, resulting in the development of more intense data-driven payer strategies.

Doug Brown, managing partner of Black Book Research Group said, "Changing government regulations are leading insurers to outsource more IT functions including big data and data base management, analytics as a service, mobile applications, population health, and security solutions,"

The fact is, while there are many business which began to utilize IT outsourcing since the 1990s, the healthcare sector was not quick to embrace the idea. Brown remarked, "The decision health insurance companies have been among the slowest to adopting outsourcing. However, shrinking margins, higher claim disbursement, and increasing competition have forced health insurers to look at outsourcing at this point in time to prove efficiencies and focus resources toward the core functions of product development and innovation."

This is good news to all medical outsourcing companies! Medical writing in the form of pharmaceutical and educational writing can now be outsourced  to companies which offer cheaper yet high-quality services. If you want some regulatory and educational medical writing, SCRIPTUS MEDICAL RESEARCH AND WEB DEVELOPMENT may be the right company for you. They offer affordable writing and web development packages.

I Almost Went Into Computer Science After High School

After High School, I knew I wanted to be a doctor. I applied to two schools: University of the Philippines and University of San Agustin. I chose BS Biology, Economics and Journalism as my courses at UP. I took the UPCAT and passed.

A week later after the UPCAT was released, I received a letter from UP Computer Science. It said that they have this new experimental program and they are getting the top 30 examinees and I was included in the top 30. The perks were free tuition, allowance, etc. I asked myself, 'Top 30 for what? I did not even apply in computer science!'

Well, my parents were not believers of computer science. For them, if I took up computer science, I would be like that encoder working in some boring office who's typing and typing all her life.

Because of financial constraints and because I was entitled to a 25% tuition discount, I enrolled at University of San Agustin Medical Technology.

Sometimes I wonder what had happened to me if I grabbed that opportunity. I may be working in tech firms now. 

On Breaking Rules: Being a Woman, Being a Doctor, Being in Tech

When I was in college, my professors would usually talk to my mom, who is also a college professor herself. Always, they have just one thing to say, "Your daughter has her own mind. You cannot teach her what to think. She has her own mind". That's what I am according to them: stubborn.

Well, there were many instances in my life wherein I have broken rules and have proven many people wrong. Let me enumerate some of them.

1. Being a Writer/Editor While Majoring in the Sciences

They say that when you are good in writing, you should be in journalism. And when you are good in math and sciences, you should be majoring in science, business or engineering. But I am proud to say I was able to graduate from Medical Technology/Clinical Laboratory Science despite being a campus writer. People used to ask me if I really want to become a medical laboratory scientist and I said yes, and they got this weird look in their eyes that say "Then why do you keep on writing stuff?". And when I went into hospital internship, I juggled press work and hospital laboratory duties. Well, I survived.

2. Becoming a Doctor While Doing Freelance Web Writing/ SEO

They say that when you go to medical school you should drop your other sidelines and just concentrate on studying medicine. Well, I also broke that rule. I turned to content writing to help finance my studies. During the early 2000s, writers who went to content writing were viewed as being stupid. After all, content writing consisted writing articles with repetitive keywords and outbound links. No journalism graduate can handle that, que horror! To earn some decent income I was willing to be trained in that "dirty" job of SEO writing. I began to write for ad companies who trained me more on SEO writing. I did not expect SEO to become this big. But I know I did the right thing, picking up the dirty job to earn gold.

3. Becoming a Resident Doctor in Internal Medicine and Doing Freelance Online Jobs

Yes, a resident's physician's duty can last for 36 hours in the hospital. But I still found time to write, as I needed the income still. I was able to finish residency training and pass diplomate exams while being a freelance writer. Not only did I become a writer, I also learned front-end web development because clients didn't want to spend more on getting a separate designer. And so I learned HTML, CSS and Javascript. I met some crazy web developers and digital marketing experts (all of them were males) who became my precious friends. They were the ones who taught me more about digital marketing and some back-end web development (PHP, SQL).

4. Starting a Drugstore and Distribution Business With Limited Capital

They say that you will need a million bucks if you want to start a drugstore and distribution business. I started small with minimum capital but I did not spend the income I earned. Instead, I used it to purchase stocks until my inventory grew and grew, along with the profits.

5. Entering the World of Web Development As a Woman and As a Doctor

Because of my skills in web development and SEO, some of my clients who owned web development companies began to invite me as a part of their teams. And so, I am a doctor during the day, but a web developer during the night until the wee hours of the morning. I was attractive to clients because I am a doctor-writer possessing IT skills. I am now a part of various web development teams from the US, India, Israel, Romania, UK and Singapore which focus on online pharmacies, medical websites and medical e-commerce sites.

So there I was, dividing my time as a doctor-by-day, vampire-by-night. I was happy. Until one day, a message popped up in my Slack saying "Hi sexy. You're so beautiful. Got a boyfriend?" It was from one of my teammates in a US-based web development company.

It was then that I realized that I am a WOMAN and I am different from them. Physically. I realized that I have long hair and that I wore a bra.

A cold realization swept through me: I am a woman. Yes I am, but what's the fuss about it? I write well, I get things done on or before the deadline. I don't do sloppy work. Why? What have I done to deserve this?

Why is there gender bias in the tech industry? This happened to me not only once but twice: my co-workers online calling me names. Was it because of how I look? Well, I admit I am not ugly-looking, but this face is just a mask. I am still a human being capable of doing what a male web developer can do! I was hired to work and not just become a teaser here! But I have NOT noticed this among Caucasian developers who came from countries where there are many women in tech. I have observed this among co-workers coming from countries where tech is a male-dominated industry, particularly in the Middle East, Pakistan and India.

I know I am not the only woman lamenting on this. This is why large organizations such as Google are encouraging more women in tech. Maybe these talented women just stopped coming to work because they were called "babes" or "sweethearts". Maybe they even experienced some form of abuse.

I know that tech work is very demanding. Even though IT is not my primary profession, I spend 8 hours a day or more doing website projects. Whenever there are projects I usually finish the job according to schedule. Even though I am very tired, if I have a deadline, I would make sure I will finish it, even if it would mean staying up late until the morning.

I hope this issue will end soon among women in science and technology. I am willing to work towards this realization. I want to end this judgmental attitude. I have broken many rules and have proven many theories wrong. Now, as a woman doctor who is currently learning to write code, I have managed to break rules again.

Anonymous Wants You To Take Down ISIS: Using Python

Recently, the world has witnessed the word war between ISIS and Anonymous. Some skeptics are actually doubtful whether Anonymous' plans will work against ISIS. You see there is a big difference between these two groups: ISIS operates on more radical and active ways while Anonymous acts silently but with considerable damage. So far, Anonymous has taken down a lot of Twitter accounts of ISIS recruiters. Some journalists say that Anonymous may actually succeed in fighting ISIS because the latter militant group recruits followers and communicates with its members through online social media. If communication is breached between followers, there is no unity towards the common goal. Thus the old adage "In unity there is no strength" holds true.

Recently, Anonymous has made an announcement to amateur programmers. It creates a call of action in fighting the war against ISIS. Through the The International Business Times, Anonymous has posted three guides on how to  identify ISIS-affiliated Twitter accounts and websites, as well as how to hack ISIS websites.

It said, ""Instead of sitting idle in the [chat] channel or lurking around and doing nothing, you can benefit greatly from the different tools and guides that have been provided to you. Your contribution means a lot and we encourage you to partake in all of the Op's activities if you can, the more the merrier."

It further went on , ""There should be plenty of work to keep you occupied so get going. If you wish to submit anything of value, place your findings on ghostbin.com and share to the link to one of the channel operators and we can talk about what to do next."

In this guide, Anonymous outlines the steps you need to make to help take down ISIS: using Python our favorite programming language. Here are the steps Anonymous has outlined:

Instructions for finding ISIS-related websites

1. Get Python at https://www.python.org/downloads/ unless you already have it (Mac does)

2. Open Terminal (or Command Prompt for Windows) and type (without quotes) "python"

3. Now, this step requires a little explanation. Let's set this out neatly, shall we...

Copy the contents of the following link to your clipboard https://ghostbin.com/paste/oo4tb
The contents of that link are some search terms that relate to ISIS and their content, allowing you to narrow down the results to specific ones
Paste the strings into the Terminal and press Enter

4. Choose a couple of strings (3 recommended) from the list of strings. For this example we will use strings 3+38+46

5. Once chosen, continue in terminal (without quotes) "print(str3+str38+str42)" and copy the results

6. Paste the results in https://www.google.iq and analyze the new results To translate pages, it is recommended to use Google Chrome, which has integrated translation

7. Submit any valid ones to one of the channel operators and we will deal with the info accordingly


Some people have actually met success with hacking using Python. You can hack Twitter accounts using Python. According to one article, you can even learn Python by hacking first. CLICK HERE on how to do it. 

There is even a video in Youtube that teaches you how to hack using Python. 

Look, I'm not teaching you to hack here. In every situation there is always the good and the bad. 

There are actually good things that you can get from hacking, and there are bad things that you can do with it. 

Ciao, till my next post. I'm actually enjoying my morning cup of coffee now so don't disturb me. 

The Use of Python in Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Research

As I have mentioned before in my previous post, Python is a top choice for medical or scientific research because it is object oriented, easy to learn and easy to read! Today, we are going to talk about limitless applications of Python in the field of chemistry and pharmacy. Python is a programming language that has been adopted by the cheminformatics community; in fact, Astra Zeneca has moved some of its codes to Python.

So what are some of the applications of Python that can help chemists and other scientists? Scipy and Pylab can be used in scientific computing. For molecular dynamics, we have MMTK; to do statistics , we can use Scipy, rpy (R) and Pychem. For Cheminformatics, we can use OEChem, frowns, PyDaylight and pychem. For bioinformatics, we can use BioPython. For stuctural biology, you can use PyMOL and for computational chemistry you can use GaussSum.

Let us first focus on SciPy. SciPy is an open source Python library used by scientists, analysts, and engineers doing scientific computing and technical computing.What is interesting to us here is that we can use SciPy for doing statistical analysis such as descriptive statistics ( variance, standard deviation, standard error, mean, mode, median), correlations (Pearson r, Spearman r, Kendall tau), statistical tests such as chi-squared, t-tests, binomial, Wilcoxon, Kruskal, Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Anderson, etc. and linear regression. It can also perform analysis of variance (ANOVA) and so much more. Wow. All these are actually our basic needs in research! (we need not hire a statistician who will do sloppy work for us for a hefty sum or download SAS/SPSS). I remember I used to download an old version of SPSS from the internet in order just to perform statistical analysis and I ended up having malware on my laptop. Whew!

Hahahaha! I am just making you laugh so that you will not get bored. I hate boring topics such as this but information technology is exciting and should not be boring. 

Funny Video: PHP vs. Python vs. Ruby vs. Java vs. .NET

This is a funny video I found on Youtube on the different programming languages. If you're a beginner, this is something that you have to check out!

Of Patient Algorithms and Python

An algorithm is defined in computer science as a specific set of instructions for carrying out a procedure or solving a problem. In medicine, doctors use algorithms in patient management. When a steps are being used to solve a certain problem, this process is known as a medical algorithm. Wikipedia defines a medical algorithm as a "any computation, formula, statistical survey, nomogram, or look-up table, useful in healthcare. Medical algorithms include decision tree approaches to healthcare treatment (e.g., if symptoms A, B, and C are evident, then use treatment X) and also less clear-cut tools aimed at reducing or defining uncertainty."

What is interesting about the Python programming language is that it supports the object-oriented programming paradigm. This means that Python considers data to be the starting point of the problem-solving process. This is why Python is so promising in medicine.

This brings into my mind the Boolean data type which may be very useful in medicine. For computer programmers and those who have studied computer science, you may have recalled that this data type consists of the values TRUE and FALSE that are associated with conditional statements. In Python, Boolean data is designated by the bool class. The possible state values for a boolean object are True and False with the standard boolean operators, and, or, and not.

Actually, these concepts are very useful in medicine. Everyday, medical doctors are faced with numerous problems regarding patient care. For instance, in the emergency room, a patient comes in unconcious, in a coma. The doctor suspects stroke, but he or she does not know whether this is a case of hemorrhagic stroke or an ischemic type of stroke. This is the standard algorithm for managing such stroke cases:

Take a look at the algorithm. Have you noticed? The steps can be rewritten using programming code. The steps contain "if and only" statements. If I were to write code for this, I will do this as follows. 

print "You are looking at the cranial CT scan. Type #1 if its a bleed or 

type #2 if its a clot"

Type of stroke = raw_input("> ")

if stroke == "1":
    print "Refer the patient to neurosurgery"
    print "1. Refer to the handsome neurosurgeon."
    print "2. Refer to the ugly neurosurgeon."

    neurosurgery = raw_input("> ")

    if neurosurgery == "1":
        print "Good job!"
    elif neurosurgery == "2":
        print "Loser!"
    else:
        print "Well, couldn't you decide? Hahaha."

elif stroke == "2":
    print "Consider fibrinolytic therapy"
    print "1. Check fibrinolytic exclusions"
    print "2. Repeat neurologic exams"

    therapy = raw_input("> ")

    if therapy == "1" or therapy == "2":
        print "Good job!"
    else:
        print "Still good!!"

else:
    print "Your'e a good doctor!"

No, sorry I was just joking. This probably wasn't the right code! Hahahahaha! You can forgive me, I'm a newbie!
Anyway, back to the discussion, there are a lot of medical algorithms that can be translated into code and made into life-saving computer programs. Do you agree with me? Can you also write code for the other medical algorithms? What can you say? I want to see your comments below!