I'm about to fly to Las Vegas for CES 2017 and I have no idea what to expect.

CES—or, as I like to call it, “The mecca for the world’s most productive nerds!”—starts this week, and I'm downright excited.

I'm turning 30 this year, in a few weeks actually. Last night, my wife and I reflected on the past year and where we want the next to go. I told her that I feel like I'm strapped to a rocket ship with my best friends, and even when I come back to earth to be with her and our newborn, my head is sometimes still in the clouds. It's a jostling juxtaposition that I guess I need to grow into.

Working as a remote team member, it's hard to define when an in-person meeting is truly needed. Sure, there's the occasional *critical all-day customer meeting* that calls for travel, and most would agree that distributed teams genuinely benefit from occasional retreats conducted in person. By and large, though, I can do my job remotely from wherever I'd like and be in continual contact with my coworkers via Slack, email, or the occasional phone call. When that doesn’t cut it, the trusty video conference helps us get some face time in.

When I first began working in healthcare 14 years ago, it was using a DOS-based system on a terminal computer for admitting and registering patients at Elkhart General Hospital in northwest Indiana. I didn’t have my own cell phone yet and the idea of buying a laptop made me nervous because so many people had experienced catastrophic crashes with them. They just didn’t seem as stable as a desktop, you know?

In other words, I began working in the stone age.

Almost a year ago to the day, I was sitting in my apartment contemplating skipping a guest lecturer in my Venture Growth class.

It was one of those bitterly cold December evenings where it got a little too dark a little too quickly and my motivation to go listen to yet another guest speaker was unsurprisingly low. I had snacks; I had on sweatpants. The chances of me moving from the couch hovered around zero percent.

Luckily, a friend in the class far more studious than I convinced me to get off the couch and drag myself outside. I say "luckily" because—and I'm not being dramatic here—that lecture wound up being the most important of my college career.

In a given day, how many canned sales emails do you receive? How many of those are either immediately re-routed, unopened, or moved to your trash folder? With the rise of services like GrowthHackers and Upwork, no e-mail account is safe from hungry business development reps trying to cast a wide enough net to hit their monthly numbers.

With an influx of digital health funding, more and more professionals from other verticals are flocking to healthcare in search of new challenges. Due to this, I find myself being asked how to sell healthcare technology to health systems, and ultimately having the same conversations week after week.

Redox is wicked excited to announce our participation in Pulse@MassChallenge, a health lab in Boston, Massachusetts! We’re particularly pumped for this accelerator because not only do we love clam chowder, but our investors, .406, are based in Boston and a number of our digital health application customers are, too. We’re looking forward to heading out to the Northeast and spending time connecting with some incredibly bright minds in the healthcare space.

Millennials catch a lot of flak about their usage of phrases and acronyms—lol, wtf, omg, fomo, nsfw, af, tbh, etc. IMO, the only group of people using more confusing jargon are those in the healthcare industry.

With the new year fast approaching, we took some time to think about the future of healthcare and predict what significant stories we'll see play out over the next year. Join us as we gaze into our snow covered crystal ball (it’s cold here in Wisconsin) for seven bold healthcare predictions for 2017.

At Redox, we have embarked on tackling a huge problem: interoperability. It’s not an atomic problem; it’s divisible into a number of more elementary, hard problems. We embarked on tackling interoperability because it’s challenging and so valuable to solve. Both aspects contribute to making Redox such an exciting place to work.

But what makes a problem hard?  It’s common knowledge that interoperability is hard, but less common is a deep understanding of what makes it so. I submit that much of what makes interoperability and it’s divisible parts so hard is the plurality of necessary concerns in the space we work in. Some of those concerns are: