We also offer insight into how to take advantage of horizontal scaling in the cloud. By integrating your app with the open cloud API, it can now control the hosting infrastructure to spin up and down servers as needed. And since our cloud is open, you never have to worry about your app getting locked in.

Up your game with Rackspace – we got your back.

Recently, I sat down with the founders of drchrono, an app that streamlines the patient-caregiver experience. From electronic health records to medical billing and patient profiles, drchrono provides heath professionals and patients an all-in-one solution that makes it this week’s Must Have App.

Healthcare In The Cloud

drchrono is a dynamic medical company that provides a core EHR platform, scheduling, patient reminders and a billing system that every practice needs. Founded in 2009 by Daniel Kivatinos and Michael Nusimow, drchrono is now used by more than 40,000 physicians and that number is growing daily. In 2011, drchrono officially launched out of Y-Combinator, a San Francisco-based accelerator. Since the app is ONC-ATCB Stage 1 certified, physicians who use drchrono over traditional filing methods can qualify for up to $44,000 in government incentives. It’s a free app for both patients and caregivers and  eliminates the mounds of paperwork and time needed to manage healthcare files, which makes it a win-win for everyone, all thanks to cloud technology.

“Our end goal is to remove paper from the doctor-patient relationship, and this is another step in that direction,” said drchrono COO and Co-Founder Kivatinos.

drchrono offers three specific tools, iPad EHR, medical billing and OnPatient, none of which would exist without the cloud. IT hardware is expensive and cumbersome for smaller practices to maintain and by using an EHR built specifically for the iPad offers unrivaled speed and performance.

Physicians can signup for free online or through the App Store to use the drchrono platform. Physicians can then use the mobile app in the exam room to record notes, view patient history and submit lab requests and e-prescriptions. The web-based version of the app is used by front office staff for practice management tasks, including appointment scheduling and medical billing. Then, the accompanying OnPatient PHR (personal health records) app gives patients mobile access to their own health records. drchrono handles the full cycle of heath information management.

drchrono was created by a team of expert designers and developers with healthcare providers in mind. For example, the EHR includes templates for clinical forms and customization tools to help automate workflows. Drawing tools, prescription requests, referrals, photos and more make it a true one-stop for healthcare professionals. Plus, the EHR also features an accurate medical speech-to-text  service using M*Modal™ – just tap and speak, and the text appears. It learns from your voice so it only gets better with use.

Technology Behind The App

drchrono’s native iOS apps are available in the iTunes app store and are built on the Rackspace Cloud.

“We use the Rackspace Load Balancer and Rackspace Cloud Files to support drchrono,” said Co-Founder Nusimow. “Our server stack is Django/Python and we also rely on HTML5 and Javascript for drchrono.com, which is a rich SaaS platform for the doctors and their staff.”

Physicians can signup for a free account online or can download the app directly to their iPad from the iTunes store. On the flip side, patients can sign up at https://www.onpatient.com/  or download the patient-specific app directly to their iPhone.

To learn more about drchrono, take a look at its demo below. Be sure to visit https://drchrono.com/or ask your healthcare provider about EHR the next time you visit.

Let’s help bring the health industry to the forefront of cloud computing.

Check back each week as we highlight a new Must Have App. If you missed last week, take a look at our previous Must Have App: Good.Co.

If you’re a startup running on Rackspace and would like to be part of this series, let us know and we’ll set up a time to talk and learn more about your awesome app.

To keep Apple growing, Woz and Co-Founder Steve Jobs found angel investor Mike Markkula, who was willing to make the investment, under one condition: Woz leave HP and focus on Apple fulltime.

After some resistance, Woz relented, realizing he could be an engineer, not a businessman with Apple. It was then that Apple was truly born. And while not every startup will be Apple, Woz says it’s important to go all in with an idea. You have to want to succeed. You have to have a reason. Personal motivation, he says, can carry a budding business further than stock or salary.

“You’ve got to really, really want to make it go, so much that you’re living and breathing it 20 hours a day; even in your dreams,” Woz says.

Here, Woz talks about Apple’s humble beginnings and offers advice to startups:

Check out the previous installments of Rackspace On Startups featuring Rackspace Startup Liaison Officer Robert Scoble, author and speaker Guy Kawasaki, Rackspace President Lew Moorman, Springboard founder Sean Kane and Rackspace Chairman and Co-Founder Graham Weston.

Some of our DevOps Rackers have created Five Pillars of Cloudiness to make sure that you know how to code your application to take advantage of all the benefits of the open cloud. To help you monitor your infrastructure, we offer Cloud Monitoring, a tool that helps you setup a variety of monitoring checks that can notify you in an instant if your app goes down.

Don’t let downtime ruffle your feathers – we’ve got your back.

Recently, I moderated a webinar with the team behind the new Cloud Control Panel, and we have the full recording available for you to watch. During the webinar, you’ll learn how we designed the new Cloud Control Panel to give customers a better experience; we’ll walk through using the New Cloud Control Panel; we’ll all geek out on new speeds and feeds; and we’ll tell you what’s in store for the future. You’ll learn fun facts about the Cloud Control Panel and its team members, and be sure to stick around for the last 20 or so minutes for the Q&A – we had approximately 50 questions asked and we go through almost all of them!

Tune in and hear Brian Harstock, Product Manager, Cloud Control Panel; Jacob Puckett, Manager, User Experience Design; and Erik Carlin, Director, Product Strategy; and Jim Battenberg, Cloud and Partner Evangelist dig deeper into our new Cloud Control Panel:

Graham Weston lives and breathes entrepreneurship. As one of Rackspace’s founders, Weston says that building a startup is all about the energy, and the excitement of wondering where a fledgling business will lead. Will it fail? Will it succeed?

While there’s no secret formula to building a great startup – it’s about finding what customers want and focusing on that, Weston says. At Rackspace, we keep that spirit alive through our Rackspace Startup Program where we focus on companies that aren’t necessarily funded by VC’s and can often be overlooked.

It boils down to innovation. That’s the lifeblood of a startup. Startups are disruptive. The cloud lets these startups innovate and disrupt inexpensively, while an open cloud gives them a neutral platform upon which they can control innovation and progress of their ideas. An open cloud enables startups to move at the speed of the future, Weston says.

In this video, hear more about why Rackspace and Weston love startups and why we want to help as many of them succeed as we can.

Check out the previous installments of Rackspace On Startups featuring Rackspace Startup Liaison Officer Robert Scoble, author and speaker Guy Kawasaki, Rackspace President Lew Moorman and Springboard founder Sean Kane.

In an ideal world, our workplace would be a source of happiness, where employers allow us to do meaningful work, aligning with personal passions. If this sounds too good to be true; think again! The creators behind Good.Co (aka Good Company) developed a professional networking app to help you find joy and meaning in your career.  This week we highlight Good.Co as our first Must Have App, a new series devoted to sharing the most innovative apps on the web.

Recently, I attended the TechStars Demo Day in San Antonio, hosted by our friends at Geekdom. Twelve startups took the stage to pitch their cloud-based apps, in hopes of securing funding or partnerships from attendees. Good.Co was among those startups. I immediately noticed a parallel between Rackspace and Good.Co: Rackspace is a strengths-based company and Good.Co looks to help employees discover their strengths and determine if those fit within their existing role or company culture.

What is Good.Co? from Good Co on Vimeo.

The Science Behind Good.Co

Users take a fun, three-minute pop culture-themed assessment consisting of 15 questions. Responses to these questions then allow Good.Co to provide a unique workplace personality type, which is called an archetype. The personality archetype allows users to explore strengths, weaknesses and ideal workplace environments through the app. Users can also see how well they fit in their current job, discover a “Fit Score” with friends and colleagues and learn how to thrive in careers.

If users are looking for a new job, they can explore the large database of business profiles to see how well they’d fit in at some of the country’s largest companies. Finally, the app integrates with LinkedIn. Now, once a user has their archetype, Fit Score and strengths, it’s easy to simply pull up LinkedIn to search job openings.

The Good.Co algorithm PPA (Proprietary Psychometric Algorithm) identifies intricate patterns in the user’s responses to help decode personality and strengths based on research by co-founder Dr. Kerry Schofield. She’s a leading psychometrician out of Oxford with more than two decades of scientific research in the field of psychometrics with statistical models.

Traditional psychometric evaluations require lengthy, time consuming, and repetitive lists of sometimes more than a 100 questions designed to understand sociability, drive, reliability, independence and intelligence. Good.Co has built its assessment on twenty years of empirical research and evolved it to be more relevant for the modern workplace, using only 15 questions! That’s much better than the time it takes to answer 100 questions.

Good.Co was founded in 2012. The inspiration for the company came from real life experiences, founder Samar Birwadker explained.

“I realized the toll a bad work culture fit can take on your personal life. Every single one of us can think of at least a handful of people who are unhappy in their jobs,” he said. “That was me.”

In fact, 46 percent of all new hires don’t get past their first 18 months of employment – specifically due to a bad cultural fit.

Birwadker had a dream to create a system that was easy to use and actually worked to match people with a company based on their personality type. “Nothing quite like what I imagined existed yet – so we created Good Company,” he said.

Even though it’s a young company, the app has seen almost 4,000 signups since its April launch at Tech Stars Demo Days, and each new user organically invites an average of two new users into the system.

To bypass the wait list and get access, head to Good.Co and use early access code goodcorackspace. Learn more and find yourself in Good Company on Twitter, Facebook and its blog.

Rackspace also offers a managed support level for your cloud hosting needs. This team of system administrators and account managers are experts in the cloud – they take the reins so you can focus on your business. Finally, we know that many people need a hybrid hosting solution that requires both a presence with both a dedicated and cloud configuration. For these folks, we have a solution called RackConnect that provides a link to both of those types of configurations. Now that’s fanatical!

With Rackspace working behind the scenes, you can sleep easy without fear of things that go bump in the night.

In the latest installment of the Enterprise Cloud Forum, Stacy Williams, Director of IT Production Support, and I recently discussed how enterprises are leveraging a cloud business model to maximize ROI.

Click here for access to the presentation and mp3 recording of the discussion, in which Stacy and I answered these key questions:

• How should we think of ROI differently in the cloud?
• What are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure your Return on Cloud?
• How can we integrate project-based accounting for real-time ROI?
• How does the cloud enable first mover advantage to maximize profits?

And, be sure to join us on May 21 when three C-level Rackers – Suaad Sait, CMO; Steve Mills, CIO; and Karl Pichler, CFO – challenge the status quo and discuss their shifting roles in a cloud world. Register now.

A successful dinner party needs two things: food and seating. In our first scenario, you are hosting this dinner party at your home. Because you are responsible for purchasing enough food and having enough seats on hand, you’re going to have to make some important decisions and purchases well in advance. To do this, you’ll have to estimate to the best of your ability.

One forecasting strategy is to rely on RSVPs. Using that data, you are able to determine an approximate amount of guests attending your party, which can help determine the amount of resources needed (food and chairs) for a successful evening.

While this strategy would work in a perfect world, I have found it to be unreliable. I often have to plan for excess, having extra chairs and food for the attendees. This results in waste because I have cooked extra food for my party. However, the opposite could happen; I could have an influx of guests who didn’t RSVP and I could not have enough seating or dinner. This scenario is analogous to dedicated hosting in the sense that you have to use a lot of estimation to plan for the traffic to your server. Conversely, if you don’t have a lot of “guests” show up, you could have spent an excess of money on your hosting solution by having all that gear up.

For our second scenario, let’s look at hosting your dinner party at a restaurant; this is analogous to cloud hosting. While you would still want to get guests to RSVP to get a general idea of the attendance, having an exact number isn’t as crucial. There is a fully staffed kitchen that can cook to order for the partygoers, so you don’t have to worry about how much food is needed. Furthermore, instead of serving an average amount of food, guests are able to order different plates and quantities of food directly off the menu, satisfying their exact appetite.

Not only can the restaurant’s kitchen produce food for extra guests, the same goes with ensuring that they have a place to sit as the restaurant has many chairs. This on-demand support of the restaurant is equivalent to the resources of the cloud that can be deployed at a moment’s notice to handle the exact traffic to your site. This is one of the true powers of the cloud – the ability to scale for your given level of Internet traffic, while ensuring that you pay just for the resources needed to serve up that traffic.