It has been a little more than a year since my last blog post, so I thought I would provide an explanation.   The bottom line is that I have not had a lot of free time to update my blog.  Two years ago this month, I took over as the Interim Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the integrated healthcare system that I work for.  This was in addition to my role as one of our system’s Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO).   The interim CIO position was supposed to be just that, a brief period of time performing this role until a permanent CIO could be selected.  However, it turned out to be a longer period of time.

I have learned a tremendous amount during my  tenure as the interim CIO.  I have a much better appreciation for the roles that both information and technology play in contributing to the success of healthcare providers and organizations understanding and delivering the most effective healthcare to patients.   In order to further educate myself about what a modern digital healthcare CIO’s responsibilities are, I had to take some time off from the MSPA program.  However, I am back in the program (now called the MSDS program – Master of Science in Data Science – more to come about the name change of the program in a future blog post).  I just completed MSDS-422 Practical Machine Learning, and am totally excited by what I learned in this course (more to come on that as well).  As an aside, the practical application of machine learning (a subset of broader artificial intelligence), will (and is starting to) revolutionize healthcare through the much deeper insights obtainable through the use of neural networks and deep learning.   Anyone learning analytics today needs to understand and be able to apply machine learning techniques.  Period.