We help vendors of healthcare information technology create more valuable products.
We help customers of healthcare information technology get more value from their deployed health IT products.
What we do
Global Healthcare Informatics provides consulting services for vendors and customers of health information technology. We can help you in the areas of:
- Product management and product design
- Strategy and tactics related to clinical content in healthcare IT systems
- Strategy and tactics for bridging the inevitable mismatches that arise between health IT product capabilities and customer needs / expectations
- Product safety, including risk management as defined by ISO 14971 (EU Medical Device Regulation) and English standard DCB0129
Global Healthcare Informatics is available for:
- Long term engagements
- Short term projects
- Intermittent advice
- Fractional roles: Chief Medical Officer / CMIO, Senior Product Manager / Director, Clinical Content Manager, Clinical Safety Officer
Our experience and principal
Ethan D. Gershon, MD is principal of Global Healthcare Informatics. Dr Gershon is a physician informaticist with over 20 years of full-time experience in healthcare informatics. During that time, Dr. Gershon has worked for both health IT vendors and healthcare providers. He has held numerous roles including product manager, physician executive, chief medical informatics officer, executive director (roughly equivalent to hospital CIO in the US), clinical safety officer, and practice manager. Much of his career has focused on serving healthcare providers outside the United States, including 8 years living and working abroad. Dr. Gershon received his M.D. from New York University Grossman School of Medicine and his B.A. from Harvard University.
Dr Gershon has experience serving many markets, including:
- Healthcare IT vendors large, medium, and small
- Healthcare providers large and small
- Critical care, peri-operative care, inpatient, rehabilitation, and outpatient
- Geographic regions including USA, Australia, UK, Middle East, and EU.
In September 2023, Dr Gershon presented to the Vanderbilt University Clinical Informatics Center Grand Rounds. Watch the video.
In Dr Gershon’s own words:
“We help vendors and customers of healthcare information technology find the best path for meeting user needs by navigating the bumpy landscape of requirements definition, the weeds of solution design, the rocky terrain of clinical content, the thickets of regulatory compliance, and the peat bog of patient safety. We can help choose the right destination, plot a course, navigate along the way, stay oriented, and bridge the gullies and chasms that separate product capabilities from customer expectations. Our professional satisfaction comes from finding and following the path that best embodies an elegant approach, a solid design, and the right balance among all the competing pressures.”
Our logo represents some of the challenges in healthcare IT
Many challenges in product development are represented by an “iron triangle”, the most well known being “rapid development, quality design, low cost – pick two but you can’t have all three”. The three-fold symmetry of the logo represents these triangular trade-offs. The logo’s three dimensional form of a knot represents the legacy challenges of both healthcare and product design: everything is strongly interconnected but sometimes the knot is simply impossible to untie and must instead be sliced apart.
The logo was generated by a program Dr Gershon wrote for fun in the late 1980s using a DOS-based software development environment which was the immediate predecessor to Visual Basic (VB). The use of a raster-based graphic and of a legacy optical character recognition typeface are inspired by healthcare’s long shadow of informatics and technology legacies in software, in standards, in reimbursement models, in regulatory regimes, and in care delivery practices. This shadow hinders the full realization of the benefits of IT in healthcare.
Contact us
Contact us through LinkedIn.