Why

Why work with iW and Eliot Muir

Eliot Muir founded iNTERFACEWARE — and now IW — and has spent almost three decades solving healthcare integration problems.

He is the original architect and creative force behind Chameleon and Iguana, and personally drove the significant technical innovations that shaped both products.

This gives Eliot an unusual combination of knowledge: he understands the technology that created the legacy, the real-world problems it was designed to solve, and how to replace it without losing what made it work.

Understanding the problem from first principles

Legacy interface migration isn't primarily an HL7 problem.

It requires understanding parsers, transformations, scripting languages, databases, stored procedures, operating systems and the countless practical compromises accumulated through decades of real-world integration.

Eliot designed much of the technology at the foundation of these systems.

That makes it possible to distinguish between two very different things:

the behavior that must be preserved and the complexity that can be discarded.

A different approach to software

Eliot's design philosophy is to reduce complicated problems to small, understandable components.

The new technology follows that principle: standard C++ at the foundation, Lua for high-level logic, minimal dependencies and an emphasis on simple code that can be understood and tested as a complete system.

The objective isn't to replace yesterday's technology with whatever happens to be fashionable today.

It is to create a smaller foundation capable of lasting for decades.

AI changes the economics

AI dramatically increases what an experienced software architect can accomplish.

Work that previously required large engineering teams can increasingly be performed by a very small organization when the architecture is simple and the person directing the work deeply understands the problem.

Combining Eliot's experience with AI creates the opportunity to address a problem that was previously too expensive to solve at scale.

But this new model creates an important question of its own:

How can customers safely depend on critical technology created and maintained by a small number of highly capable people?

That question leads directly to the final part of this series: security and business continuity.