Health IT, MedCity Influencers, Policy

HIT consultant: Sebelius should have picked Oracle cake mix instead of starting from scratch

Our synopsis of Dave Kellogg’s critique of Oracle DBA lifers has generated a great conversation. […]

Our synopsis of Dave Kellogg’s critique of Oracle DBA lifers has generated a great conversation. This post is a comment from HIT consultant Barbara Duck.

I have nothing against MarkLogic and actually did a nice write up on how CMS is using the search engine/data base combination to find fraud with a Cray utility.  It’s pretty hot.

You can also find the interview with the CEO of MarkLogic at Oracle Open World to where he states when you have Oracle heavy apps running on a system, they (MarkLogic) may not be the correct choice.  They don’t have the Java libraries that Oracle and even open source has, and they don’t use a schema, XML and it works great. I do have to say I don’t think this was the place for them as it is Oracle heavy and Oracle built all their Fusion middle ware components to already integrate, 6 years worth of coding to do that.  There’s an article on the web from a programmer who worked with it and he tells you all the extra code he had to write and said it made him a better programmer writing more code but he was leaving it to go back to Json Java, the standard.

So again you gotta know something about code and integration. We also had the CGI group soaking up more money writing Red Hat Apps and JBoss from the ground up.  This all takes a ton of time and someone was duped there too. Take your choice: an engineered Oracle system with about 2/3 of the code written to integrate already done or open source integration and custom software writing from scratch. It’s like making a cake with cake mix or from scratch.

No matter which way one would go, there would be issues but someone’s ego had no idea of the time. I used to be a developer and know the time elements and the complexities.  What CMS tried to do was impossible … and they got duped … so when you have a tight time frame you bite the bullet and buy off the shelf and actually the software itself is cheaper than writing from the bottom up and you are going to have coding and development no matter what route you go … so cake mix or from scratch … Oracle has almost everything they needed and they know it.

In 2011, I wrote about both the Microsoft and Oracle turnkey state software platforms … and I never heard a word from anyone about them … did anyone look, use them, consult?  Duh, read this post about HHS and CMS lying about code being done.

This is exactly why I said don’t put Sebelius in the job in 2009, she has not even a tiny bit of IT experience and she will be duped and duped again and she will make plenty of silly comments, like hurry up Health IT and so on even before this … wrong person in the wrong job.

You can quote it as I said it in 2009 … and health IT, as I said, would eat her up.

Oracle already had to bring in their WebLogic server which is far more sophisticated at this point than open source JBoss.  I don’t know if they are also maybe using Oracle or SQL, which would make sense as well since it can translate SQL queries which is what all transactions are, Oracle’s been doing it for years for most insures and has 834s with most insurers for the data transfers.


Veronica Combs

Veronica is an independent journalist and communications strategist. For more than 10 years, she has covered health and healthcare with a focus on innovation and patient engagement. Most recently she managed strategic partnerships and communications for AIR Louisville, a digital health project focused on asthma. The team recruited 7 employer partners, enrolled 1,100 participants and collected more than 250,000 data points about rescue inhaler use. Veronica has worked for startups for almost 20 years doing everything from launching blogs, newsletters and patient communities to recruiting speakers, moderating panel conversations and developing new products. You can reach her on Twitter @vmcombs.

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