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Showing posts from March, 2020

Using Windows Terminal to fight Covid-19

Covid-19 has been declared a pandemic by WHO. Countries around the world are working to contain and treat Coronavirus affected patients. People are asked to avoid congregating in large numbers and work from home if possible. There are multiple precautions suggested by WHO such as washing hands, avoid touching your face, etc. However as we increasingly work in isolation, it is easy to forget these instructions. As a software developer, I mostly spend my day working on the freshly baked Windows Terminal . It is an amazing piece of software that you can customize to your heart's content. Scott Hanselman has done an amazing series of blog posts around that. Now what if I can get Windows Terminal to prompt me and tell me about the precautions that I need to take! To get this working on your machine, 1. you need to follow the instructions in Scott Hanselman's blog post first. 2. Next customize the theme for your terminal as provided in this gist. This theme cycles thro

Enabling IT in Healthcare by simulating Patient Data

In the current times of pandemics and disease outbreaks, it is of paramount importance that we leverage software to treat diseases. One important aspect of healthcare is Patient Management. IT systems have to be developed which can support management at an enormous scale. Any development of such good software system requires data which is as realistic as possible but not real. There has to be a fine balance between privacy and enabling developers to anticipate the myriad health scenarios that may occur. Towards this initiative, healthcare industry has been standardizing around the HL7 (Health Level 7) protocol. The HL7 protocol itself has undergone transformation from pipe-based formats (v2.x) to JSON/XML based (FHIR) modern formats. FHIR is the future of HL7 messages and is being increasingly adopted. However given the slow nature and reluctance by healthcare providers to change or upgrade their systems, a majority of hospitals still use the HL7 2.3 format. FHIR is a modern for