Engineering Health

Cuando no están trabajando, Denisse Osorio de Large, Directora de Cerner en Desarrollo de Salud Poblacional y Steven Large, Director sénior de Desarrollo de IP, quienes están casados, tienen como pasión crear una generación joven motivada por la tecnología y mostrarle a la misma el amplio mundo de oportunidades existentes en el desarrollo de software. Además de dar su tiempo como voluntarios en la comunidad promotora del área de ciencias, tecnología, ingeniería y matemáticas (STEM), contribuyen a organizar la conferencia de desarrollo de Cerner (DevCon) y realizan presentaciones en conferencias, Denisse y Steven disfrutan trabajar con niños de la comunidad de habla hispana.

One Cerner Style Icons (OCS Icons) are foundational UI elements required to produce a cohesive and consistent User Experience for Cerner Solutions. OCS Icons consist of a comprehensive icon library of platform agnostic assets which can be easily consumed by development teams. Why? The primary goal of this effort to elevate every aspect of the UI to create the best possible user experience. In order to do that, it is imperative to develop a system composed of strong design patterns and well-founded user research.

At Cerner, we use Chef. In fact, we’re heavily ingrained with Chef in our configuration management practices. We deploy services from Tomcat to Kafka with Chef. Even the first open source project we announced was a tool for Chef! With all of this integration with Chef, we need a simple way to manage all of those versions. This is where the Version Databag cookbook comes in. At a high level, this cookbook allows us to define our versions in a centralized data bag (grouped under conceptual units) and populates the corresponding node attributes required with those versions at runtime.

Over the past few years, Cerner has been developing a standards-based platform on top of our Cerner Millennium® EHR. Rather than roll our own API, we’ve been using the HL7® FHIR® standard. For app integration, we’ve been using the SMART® on FHIR specification. If you’re not immediately familiar with those acronyms, you’re definitely not alone. As we were developing the services, we were also fielding questions from 3rd party developers, answering a lot of questions internally, and trying to keep up with the specifications themselves.

Background: Micah is currently a software architect in Population Health Development in Healthe Intent Development at Cerner. In 2013, Micah Whitacre received committer status on the Apache Crunch project, and is now a Project Management Committee (PMC) member of the project. How has Cerner been been involved in Apache Crunch? In 2012 and 2013, Cerner started using this project within several solutions. We also wanted to give back to the community and decided to invest time in helping answer questions and concerns, and overall project needs.

It’s likely not a surprise that Cerner would use Apache Kafka as we have used a number of related technologies like Apache Hadoop along with its Map/Reduce, HDFS and even Apache HBase. Our team first started using Apache Kafka in 2014 when Kafka 0.8 first came out. Since then we’ve expanded to using Kafka for a number of different use cases (1, 2) and it has become a core piece of Cerner’s infrastructure.

Beadledom is a framework for building Java based web services. It bundles several open sourced components required for building JAX-RS services. Why? HealtheIntent, Cerner’s population health management platform, started 3.5 years ago. We went through the process of investigating different technologies for the platform. We decided on using Java for building services and arrived on a set of libraries that we believed work well together. The long history of Java has led to an ocean of libraries that are available to Java developers.

Cerner’s 7th ShipIt Day took place on December 8th and 9th. ShipIt is a 24-hour hackathon with the goal of building something awesome, usable, and value-adding within a single day. The event was hosted at our DevCenter in the Realization Campus, a large open space that hosts our DevAcademy (to learn more about our DevAcademy, check out this earlier post). We had 18 teams made up of associates from different Cerner organizations.

Meet Alan and Grace. These lighthearted, 8-bit characters were nominated in early 2014 to become the iconic mascots of Engineering at Cerner. Have you ever wondered who these 80’s video gaming inspired characters on our Engineering t-shirts are? Why were they chosen as mascots? What do they represent? The countless hours spent pondering these questions will be no more. Pull up a chair as we dive into the mystery behind the dynamic duo known as Alan and Grace.