Engineering Health

With October being Cybersecurity Awareness month, we thought it would be a good time to reflect on some of the things we do in engineering to educate our associates and infuse security into our culture. We have over 28,000 associates worldwide supporting hundreds of solutions with millions of lines of code. Each associate has a specialization, such as software development, system support, and consulting. Keeping everyone up to date on the latest in security is a difficult task.

As a software engineering executive from Colombia, I thought that the best way to honor Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15-October 15) was to help the local Girl Scout Hispanic troops earn one of the new cybersecurity badges. October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, having the activities nearing October seemed very fitting. Girl Scouts has been focusing on STEM badges for all ages with several new initiatives in the past couple of years.

Pipeline-as-code or defining the deployment pipeline through code rather than manual job creation through UI, provides tremendous benefits for teams automating builds and deployment infrastructure across their environments. Source of image Jenkins Pipelines Jenkins is a well-known open source continuous integration and continuous deployment automation tool. With the latest 2.0 release, Jenkins introduced the Workflow plugin that implements Pipeline-as-code. This plugin lets you define delivery pipelines using concise scripts which deal elegantly with jobs involving persistence and asynchrony.

This month we held our quarterly hackathon event- called ShipIt Day. We would like to thank all the participants for making ShipIt Day XII a huge success. With 75 participants, we had associates representing 13 different organizations across Cerner. These associates were given 24-hours to meet the requirements of this hackathon which included making something that was innovative, usable, and value-adding. As the clock ticked down, our associates worked in their teams to complete a project while taking some time to enjoy the fun activities happening throughout ShipIt day.

Pratik will be starting his Junior year at the University of Michigan this Fall studying Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering. This summer he’s a Software Intern on Cerner’s LightsOn Network team. This is the story of his summer experience: As a college student, it’s not every day that you get to work on cutting edge technology to transform healthcare as we know it. Every morning, I walk past a wall on the way to the elevator: "Health care is too important to stay the same.

The FHIR standard started as a better way to exchange healthcare data, but it also provides a solid basis for deep analytics and Machine Learning at scale. This post looks at an example from the recent FHIR DevDays conference that does just that. You can also run the interactive FHIR data engineering tutorial used in the conference yourself. Our first step is to bring FHIR data into a data lake – a computational environment where our analysis can easily and efficiently work through petabytes of data.

Open source and open standards encourage collaboration around innovation that advances the health care industry through improved interoperability. Developers across health care can come together and use open source code to share information, as well as develop and continually improve apps to support better health outcomes for patients. At Cerner, developing open platforms that support interoperability standards like SMART® and FHIR® is integral to our mission of transforming health care. In addition to implementing these standards in our platforms, we also participate in organizations like HL7 and the Argonaut Project to help shape and develop these standards.

This past spring, I had the pleasure of attending SREcon18 in Santa Clara, California. If you have never heard about SREcon or the term SRE then let me diverge for a moment to describe. SRE, or Site Reliability Engineer, was coined by Google employees back in 2003 when a team of software engineers were tasked with running a production environment. It’s the new hotness in the technology world, so an internet search will turn up a bunch of topics.

Throughout the month of May, teams across Cerner’s Engineering space have welcomed 197 software interns to our campuses in Kansas City and Malvern. Ranging from rising seniors in high school to rising seniors in college, these interns will be working alongside Cerner’s full time engineers to enhance and expand upon their current skillsets. While interning at Cerner, these associates will experience firsthand the look and feel of a day in the life of a full time software engineer.