Mayank's Blog

For the past year and half, Covid-19 pandemic has forced most of the companies to allow their employees to work from home. However, now that vaccines are available, companies are looking for a way to get their employees back to office safely. Most of the organizations are creating some kind of app which will capture employee health information safely and allow them to get approve/deny an employee's return to office. But what if instead of rolling out your own platform, you could leverage the full power of Azure with almost no code and also ensure full compliance with health data regulations. Meet Azure Health Bot. Azure Health Bot is an Azure Marketplace offering by Microsoft built on top of Microsoft Bot Platform. It provides features like drag/drop editor, authentication with OAuth providers, generating reports and managing user information. It also integrates with existing chat apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger etc. so that users don't have to install a new ap...

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...

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...