2. A Total HIS on a Micro?
• Back in the early ‘80s, PCs were much less powerful than today:
– My first Mac “SE” had less than 1 Meg (not Gig, Meg!) of main
memory, and no hard drive – I was too cheap to pay the extra
$400 Apple wanted for the 10-Meg external device…
– I/O was all via two 5½ inch diskettes holding 400K each – one
for the OS, one for the App (usually Microsoft “Works 1.0”).
• So building a complex suite of HIS applications on a PC was pretty
daunting, and it took a pretty gutsy (dumb?) guy to dare to try it!
• Who in HIS-tory was the first to try?
• I’ll give you a hint: his vendor consulting
firm is known as “Kelzon,” which was the
name of a horse he and his lovely wife
Suzanne once were very fond of, and
he’s a frequent contributor to HIS-talk…
3. Another “HIS-tory Hero!”
• Frank Poggio – was the entrepreneur who dared to do it first:
– Frank started in healthcare in NY, first at HANYS (Hospital
Association of NY State), then Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co.
– With all this freezing NY experience, it is easy to understand his
next move: Associate Administrator/VP at University of
Wisconsin Hospital, (CFO & CIO in today-speak).
• He told me a great story once how he was charged to
evaluate various Medical School dept DP projects there.
• In Psychiatry, there was a very bright programmer who was
working on a grant that had just ended & needed $$$s...
• However, the Psych system did medical research and Frank
determined Medicare would not reimburse the hospital, so
he did not roll the Psych application into his DP department.
• Who was this young programmer? Two hints: (1) Her name
was Judy (2) The U of W Hospital is in Madison, Wisconsin
4. PC Pioneer
• Yes, that Judy! So if Frank had funded her project, by today, Ms.
Faulkner might have risen to be a hospital programming manager!
• Anyway, back to PCs, with Frank’s background in finance, when
the PC revolution hit in the early ’80s, he followed the same path
as Tom Boyle mentioned in the last episode, tackling the onerous
Medicare Cost Report with all it’s step-down & RCC minutia…
• What kind of powerful machine did he write his first system on?
• What else – a Radio Shack
TRS 80, that came with:
- 48K of main memory &
- 120K diskettes for I/O.
• Don’t laugh, because wait ‘til
you read how well it sold…
5. What To Call a “Micro Cost Pack?”
• Fascinating how these HIS-tory episodes link together, but
remember how the “Big 8” accounting firms dominated
consulting back in the 80s? Well, just like Tom Boyle had hooked
up with C & L, Frank struck a deal with Ernst & Whinney in 1983
to sell his PC-based system which they called “MicroKostpak”
• Frank and E/W also had the sense to migrate his software to
IBM’s PC announced in 1982, expecting their market dominance.
• So how many CFOs would buy such a radical new system on a PC?
• Would you believe, over 1,000!! It did help
that E&W had many hospitals using an
older time sharing cost report system.
• The influx of capital funded Frank’s next
dream – no, he wasn’t going to buy horse
farm and name it Kelzon-town, he had a
bigger and far more daring idea…
6. Bold Vision
• Check out the power this little PC offered way back in 1982:
– 128K (K, not Meg!) of main memory and a 5 Meg hard drive!
• Remembering how well MicroKostpak sold on an IBM PC, he soon
migrated his system to an IBM XT (with a 10 meg drive) in 1983.
• Again drawing on his
financial, consulting and CFO
experience, Frank started
programming a complete set
of financial apps on a Vector
Graphic Micro, pictured here:
• Actually, it took two PCs for the whole system:
- One for patient accounting: ADT, BL & AR
- One for general accounting: AP, GL, PR, etc.
• How did these two PC systems ever interface?
7. By “Sneaker Net!”
• CFOs merely took a diskette from one PC
and walked on down the hall to the other
where they read it in to create journal
entries into the GL from Patient Acctg!
• Don’t laugh: it was far more reliable than
some of the interfaces I’ve seen today…
(the picture above shows Frank on an R&D
foray near some frozen Wisconsin lakes)
• So what data base did Frank use? That’s
another fascinating throwback to an
earlier HIS-tory episode: remember
“Unifile,” SMS’ breakthrough “On-Line,
Real Time” system that pioneered use of
a relational data base, rather than IBM’s
“SHAS” batch-processed VSAM files?
8. What Do You Call a “Meta” File?
• SMS’ first technical VP was a very bright and very nice
individual (a rare combination in IT!): Allan Sprau
• Allan did a superb job of managing the evolution of
Unifile by SMS’ programmers, led by his good friend
and fellow Eskimo, Ken Shumaker, also from Minn.
• Allan met Frank Poggio at frozen U. of Wisconsin
Hospital, which was one of Unifile’s early adopters.
After Unifile morphed into Focus and then Command, Allan left SMS
and formed his own firm in Minn., intending to sell the data base
concept to other industries needing such a “meta” file system.
He named it Metafile Information Systems, Inc, and started selling
the MetaFile db for use on computers systems for all industries.
Frank Poggio heard about his old friend who was also freezing up in
the northlands, and the rest is HIS-tory, as Frank adopted Metafile
for use on the PCs in his now “on-line, real time, data base” system.
