Albert Di Rienzo, Blue Highway’s President and CEO, was honored with the award of ‘Most Valuable Thought Leader’ at the Frost and Sullivan Executive MindXchange Conference in San Francisco March 14-16.

Di Rienzo received this award in 2006. However, only two people have ever been honored with this award at the conference within a 10-year period, Di Rienzo is one of them.

“The caliber of people at this conference is what makes this award so exceptional,” says Di Rienzo.

The peers at the conference, ranging in the academics, medical and government fields vote on the award. At least 100 top (C-Level) executives were at this conference.

Gabe Manzano, Director of Thought Leadership & Business Development at Frost & Sullivan, says the award is based on a variety of factors. “We look at comments from audience members, sponsors and facilitators. The event producer and national sales director also give their recommendation based on observation onsite,” Manzano said.

Other considerations included the number of sessions the Thought Leader assists in and how much the person adds to the value of the overall series at the conference.

Blue Highway continuously participates in academic and industry advisory boards in relation to technology leadership and disruptive innovations within the global healthcare ecosystem.

In addition to Frost & Sullivan, Di Rienzo serves on the CenterState Corporation for Economic Opportunity Innovation and Entrepreneurship Advisory Board, Columbia University Center for Advanced Information Management External Advisory Board, Cornell University Biomedical Engineering Advisory Board, Excell Partners Technical Advisory Board, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Science & Technology Alliance, Syracuse University Center for Advanced Systems & Engineering Advisory Board and Syracuse University College of Engineering & Computer Science Dean’s Council.

Researchers at Blue Highway will be representing the company at the Medical Cyber-Physical Systems Conference on April 11 in Chicago.

Albert Goldfain, Ph.D., Atanu Roy Chowdhury, Min Xu, Ph.D., Jim DelloStritto and Jonathan Bona of Blue Highway were honored with an acceptance of their paper, Semantic Alarms in Medical Device Networks, for the conference. The paper will be specifically noted during the Medical Device Plus and Play Workshop.

The paper discusses and describes preliminary work on semantic alarms, which are intended for deployment in a multi-parameter vital sign monitoring system. It concludes that there are many sources for additional context that could enrich the current simplistic alarm mechanism found in modern vital sign monitoring systems. There are those discussed in the paper and also external tools that warn about the critical inconsistencies with a clinical plan. The semantic alarm framework is an attempt to bring more of this meaningful information upstream to the device display.

“Since actionable data lives closer to the device, a monitoring system that is truly supportive of clinical decision making will need to be equipped with increasingly sophisticated (and smarter) alarms,” says Goldfain.

The conference is a joint workshop on Medical Device Plug and Play (MD PnP) and HCMDSS (High Confidence medical Devices, Software, and Systems). The workshops allow for engagement and discussion among medical device specialists, which include researchers, developers and caregivers (within clinical environments), industry, research laboratories, academia and government.