On Jan 9, 2011, at 6:46 PM, SW Engineer wrote:
So @walter, what do you recommend to approach healthcare through RoR?
Healthcare is much too large a target for me to say "do this" or "read
that". I worked for several years at Medical Broadcasting Corporation,
now Digitas Health, and worked on a lot of different kinds of
healthcare + Web projects (this was long before Rails came along).
* Some of these were basic static sites to promote a drug or to post
the warnings somewhere so they didn't have to waste so much of the
commercial time telling you it would grow hair on your palms or
whatever.
* Some were quite ambitious intranet/extranet collaboration tools for
the marketing team.
* Some were information-gathering systems for clinical trials.
* Some were very early social media attempts -- way too far ahead of
the curve for anyone to try them.
* One was (I kid you not) a Web application to help people choose
gifts for friends or relatives who were in the hospital or recovering
from a serious illness. All sorts of magical fuzzy logic in there --
don't buy stuffed animals for a person with allergies -- that
basically recreated common sense for the senseless. Over a million and
a half dollars and it was pulled in less than a year.
So there's a LOT of different things under the "healthcare" tent that
you could pick to work on.
What made it easy at MBC was the sales team -- all hand-picked from
the cream of Big Pharma marketing -- who really knew the ins and outs
of how a pharma company worked on the inside, and could think up
clever ways for us to wiggle in there and build something cool for a
profit.
If you can't replicate that part of the equation, I doubt that Rails
or any other framework would help you much. But if you have landed a
project to work on, Rails will help you build it much more quickly
than traditional techniques.
Please do post some more focused questions and I (and others) will no
doubt be happy to help you.
Walter
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