Intro

After a fair amount of time spent choosing the theme for my newly created blog, I'm ready for my first post.

Let's start with some introductions: my name is Roberto Ruggeri and I'm a Technical Strategist for Microsoft Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS). My focus is primarily on healthcare providers (physicians, hospitals, clinics), but there is a significant amount of overlap with Health Plans and Life Sciences.

I have been at Microsoft for almost 8 years, started working in Rome, Italy (not Georgia) as a System Engineer covering government accounts like the Ministry of Finance, the Italian Postal Service and others. I moved to Redmond, WA about 5 years ago and have been working as a Technical Evangelist/Strategist for HLS since then. Some of the things I worked on in the past five years are the BizTalk Accelerators for HIPAA and HL7, the Office Reference Implementations for healthcare and other stuff (don't want to play all my cards now ;-).

My background is primarily in technology, although I have worked as a developer/systems analyst for hospitals before (registration, Laboratory Information Systems, EDI…).

My job today has three primary aspects: work with the Microsoft product teams to help them understand the healthcare requirements and build products that are better suited for the industry, work with Microsoft's customer and partners as well as the industry at large to evangelize the Microsoft platform and strategy, specifically around healthcare solutions, and lastly helping the Microsoft field be more successful in their dialogue and relation with Microsoft customers.

My role is mostly US-based, but I work with a number of folks implementing healthcare solutions across the globe.

I am the liaison with a number of Healthcare Standard Development Organizations (SDOs) for Microsoft: HL7 for the past five years where I am the author and editor of the HL7 Web Services Profiles, ASTM for the past three years, where I contributed to the CCR standard, CDISC where I participated in a number of joint projects with HL7, and a few other standards.

I am also the technical lead for the National Healthcare Information Infrastructure (NHIN)/Regional Healthcare Information Organizations (RHIO) efforts within Microsoft.

I hope we'll get to know each other better as we explore the use of Microsoft technology in the Healthcare Communication and Information Technology field.

Ciao,
-RR