Lantana Group Blog

Kristin Schrock, Technical Writer

In 2019, greenLantana made a big decision—to offset the environmental impact of our web presence. Lantana employees want to better their community and environment. We avoided the environmental impact of the brick and mortar office and work commute by becoming a distributed company, and we have a drive to further reduce our environmental impact. We…

The program took nearly 48 hours to run. On a tight timeline, this wasn’t ideal. Then we had to make several last-minute changes to the code right after our engineer went on parental leave. None of us knew enough about C# to confidently fix the code. Today things look quite different. The 48-hour task takes…

After working at Lantana Consulting Group for 11 months as a Project Coordinator, I was excited to experience my first Lantana retreat and meet my teammates. Since Lantana is a distributed company, I primarily communicate with coworkers via email, instant messaging, web meetings, and telephone. At the retreat, I connected face-to-face and put faces with…

I first thought SAS was a coding program used for cleaning up and validating large amounts of data and for generating reports. Since I had never coded before, it seemed too complicated, and I thought I could just use Excel as a data analysis tool. But SAS is more efficient than manually validating data or…

U.S. Antibiotic Awareness Week (USAAW) raises awareness about appropriate antimicrobial use and the threat of antimicrobial resistance. More than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result.[1] Improving antimicrobial use improves the treatment of infections, protects patients from preventable harms from antimicrobials, and…

Transitioning from a corporate office space to working from home has been great—a millennial’s dream. Instead of having to leave for work in the morning and battling rush hour, I have the luxury of getting up and going downstairs to log into my computer. When I first discovered I’d be working from home, I imagined…

Lantana has engaged in standards development and deployment for over ten years and supported the development of over 70 specifications. We were pleased to take the opportunity to respond and contribute comments on the 2019 Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA) issued by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC). Our key recommendations…

My healthcare IT journey began in 1988 when I accepted a clerical position in the Ambulatory Care department at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada. The department was implementing a new computerized Patient Registration system, which I learned relatively easily, and I was intrigued with the accuracy and efficiency of this new process. The new system allowed for more precise patient scheduling and the ability to view all outpatient clinic activity. I wanted to learn more, so I took classes on Computerized Business Systems and Programming at Ryerson University in the evenings, while working at the hospital in the daytime.

I grew up in rural northern Ohio playing outside and exploring the countryside—rain, snow, or sunshine. I loved being outside, active, and just playing in the dirt. I also loved school, especially biology and art class. I was good at both. I was expected to go to college, while my best friend joined the Army.…

As a teen, when people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said a doctor. In high school, my favorite classes were biology and human anatomy, and I enjoyed listening to and helping people. As a summer lifeguard, I enjoyed the feeling of saving lives and keeping people safe. (Yes, I did actually save people during my tenure! Learning to swim is a life-saving skill!) Becoming a doctor seemed like a logical career path.

In May, I attended the CleanMed conference in Nashville where professionals from across the industry including clinicians, architects, hospital administrators, policy consultants, sustainability officers, hospital vendors and a very nice veterinary specialist discussed sustainability in their healthcare institutions.

When I was growing up, I wanted to become a veterinarian because I love animals. However, when I was twelve, my grandfather, who had a chronic health condition, came down with influenza A and passed away after only three days in the hospital. As my family sat with him, the nurses came in to monitor his condition frequently to make him comfortable. Their compassionate care to him was wonderful, but they didn’t just care for him.

I always knew I wanted to become a nurse. I wanted to save the world by helping others, and as a young adult, I thought helping others always meant being at the patient’s side.

Growing up, my role models were family friends who were registered nurses. They were compassionate and confident. I wanted to be like them. After graduating nursing school, I went to work in surgical ICU. Looking back now, I realize I have always relied on and have learned to trust technology even when it was electronic devices connected to my ICU patients.

I took an indirect path to nursing informatics. I started on my journey early—as a candy striper volunteer in a tertiary care center at the age of 13. This experience was my first contact with patients in a hospital setting.

HL7 Working Group Meetings (WGM) – #HL7WGM in my social media-oriented mind– are bustling, busy, eventful gatherings held three times a year that draw standards-minded people from around the world. I experienced my first HL7 WGM January in San Antonio, and from my short amount of time in the health IT (HIT) industry and little experience with standards in general, you could say I was overwhelmed but learned a ton.

The me of ten years ago never would have predicted the career that I have now. Ten years ago, I was majoring in mathematics and economics at the University of California San Diego, on track to become a retirement actuary. I took a class on the US healthcare system to fulfill one of my general education requirements, and the professor assigned us a paper on a local healthcare organization of our choice.

In the summer of 2001, I had one of those life-defining moments while interning at Harvard Medical School; I discovered the public health field. Up to that point, all I ever wanted to be was a family medicine physician with a dream of one day opening a private practice to help those in my community back in Peekskill, New York.

The American Public Health Association (APHA) observes National Public Health Week during the first week of April each year. Each of Lantana’s public health analysts has a story to tell of their journey–we couldn’t let the nursing informaticists have all the fun. Keep an eye out for upcoming blogs about the individual journeys each of…

Over the past 25 years, my nursing journey has taken me down different professional paths. At each crossroad in my career, I used the Servant Leadership philosophy as my compass to guide my journey. During my master’s program in nursing, I read Servant Leadership in Nursing by Mary Elizabeth O’Brien. I was finally able to put a…