Answer these questions before you opt for a costly & heavy vendor solution..for your IT function..

• Do you really need every feature provided in the vendor solution?

• Are you using a mission critical system and vendor is providing quick and accurate resolution?

• Are your applications requiring complex to very complex logic?

• How much business risk does the deployed functionality cover, what's the risk factor quotient? 

• How much risk to cost factor is attained by spending the amount on the solution being considered?

• Is there an open source solution available for the same functionality, is that scalable for your needs?

• Down time-line(3-5 yrs) what the returns to investment ratio for a costly vendor solution compared to the open source solution?

• What is the flexibility to change ratio on the vendor to open source solution?

For most of the organisations except the few 5-10%, the answers are simple & straight forward and so is the solution - aiming to give a flexible option at little to no cost,  the question is - are you spending more time, money and energy on a vendor lock-in which is slowing down the progress of your product in the rapidly evolving world.

Well, firms like Apple took a decision to make sure they have more flexibility and can change quicker by choosing for an in-house product which scales according to company needs (like they opted for their own processor)

It might be time others might want to follow.

The B word - 'Blockchain'.. and how will this probably apply to medicine & healthcare..

A Block chain in simple words represents source of one single truth.

It can represent a record of human exchange at a particular point in history.

So what is blockchain here?
It's a generalised framework for implementing decentralised compute resources.

In simple terms :

    A blockchain is a digitized, decentralized, public ledger of all cryptocurrency transactions. Constantly growing as ‘completed’ blocks (the most recent transactions) are recorded and added to it in chronological order, it allows market participants to keep track of digital currency transactions without central recordkeeping. Each node (a computer connected to the network) gets a copy of the blockchain, which is downloaded automatically.

Let's understand via the Medrec - Case study done by MIT

• The block content represents data ownership and viewership permissions shared by members of a private, peer-to-peer network.  
• Include in the record a cryptographic hash of the record to ensure against tampering therefore indicating the ingregity of the data.
• Providers can add a new record and patients can authorise sharing of records between providers.
• Ethereum block chain employs a DNS like implementation which maps an already existing and widely accepted form of ID e.g. name or social security # to the person's Ethereum address. A syncing algorithm handles data exchange "off-chain" between a patient database and provider database after referencing the blockchain to confirm permissions via a database authentication server.

A chain can be composed of the below :

A) Registrar contract

    - name e.g. - sam smith, ethernet address

B) Summary contract
   - sam ethernet address, ppr address

C) Patient Provider relationship `

  -  owner, emr queries, permissions, mining bounties.

A block chain can comprise of a mix of A, B  & C over a period of time.

Sample implementation may compose of the following:

MedRec Service --> DB gatekeeper --> EHR Manager --> Miner -- to mine data on the blockchain

A MedRec service receives a request for data - contact with DB gatekeeper after checking the EHR or  Ethereum manager - getting contract of requestee provider or consumer and then using the Miner to mine the query over the blockchain.

Quoted by the case study as below -- 
'As envisioned by the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), the MedRec patient record would reflect the many facets of health data, by accepting not just physician data, but also data from the patient’s Fitbit, Apple HealthKit, 23andMe profile, and more. Patients can build a holistic record of their medical data and authorize others for viewership, such as physicians providing a second opinion or family members and care guardians.'

MedRec smart contract structure can represent one model of Healthcare Care Directory and Resource Location. secured by public key cryptography enabled with crucial properties of provenance and `data integrity. A block chain log provides clarity for communication authorisation across the Health IT ecosystem and an audit for subsequent inquiries.

Some of the worlds best healthcare firms are already started to support the above model to understand the impact and include the Ethereum smart contracts to orchestrate a content access system across separate storage and provider sites.

Block chain will find it's use and continued growth in the usage as the data-security and autonomous data governance comes more into practise. This promises to be be a prime form of data exchange when virtualised access bodies like enhanced artificially intelligent agents or avatars start transacting on behalf of the provider or client in future. Block chain transformation is gradual but might soon pickup speed once the autonomous governance strategy require the same to be the authenticating and authorising entity for any transaction request in timeline history.

Stay tuned for more updates on this ...

Angular 6 ... what's coming in April ... a look !

Angular 6 would be released with a stable version in this month of April, let's take a look at what it will entail.. 

• Lazy load template URLs  - adding resource in

• Node 8 runtime engine support which goes in with TypeScript 2.7
  
  
• More testability - Testability API will have the time-outs function & will add task tracking - this is useful to design around performance and decide which tasks would keep running and which can be aborted - intelligent device ram usage 
  
  
• Want more aggressive optimisations - go for side-affect free flags.
  
  
• Have injectables change the scope in one go -- Tree-shakable provider API updates.
  
  
• Create custom elements based on angular components.
  
  
• Few components will be not available like - animation import from core, tslib 1.9.0 needs to be updated in package.json & template tag is deprecated & replaced by ng-template.

Good news ... angular 6 is completely backward compatible with Angular 5.

Some interesting new features - 

1. IVY renderer - backward compatible angular renderer which is focussed around speed improvements, size reduction and flexibility.
Read more here ... https://herringtondarkholme.github.io/2018/02/19/angular-ivy/

I like this part ... 'As a platform independent framework, can we run application without platform specific code? The answer is NO, of course. Ivy just inlines DOM Rendere to its core. '

2. Bazel compiler - why build everything when you just changed a speck of it... welcome to the Bezel world.. code fragments which are build have ingrained reachability to understand which component needs to be built or which changed or changed in a way to have it rebuilt. 

3. Closure compiler - what about what didn't change and was never used... Java world has run time garbage collection, ng world is still on its way but has introduced something which eliminates dead code by generating smaller bundles.

4. Component Dev Kit - you can use pre-built components in the angular world instead of building from scratch.. 

wanna know more ... find out here.. 

https://blog.angular.io/a-component-dev-kit-for-angular-9f06e3b4b3b4

5.Service worker - added with stable version of worker.. browser level service cache.

Some other interesting changes are .. 

• Multiple validators for array method of FormBuilder.

• Handling string with and without line boundary.

• Router has enhanced navigationSource and restoredState so as to provide if navigation was triggered.