Patrick Haren

Background

About Patrick Haren

Patrick is an Information Technology leader and strategist with a broad technical and business background who particularly enjoys creatively solving challenges found in the healthcare system. His overall experience has been across a broad set of industries and technologies, including pure software/tech-companies, consulting firms, healthcare services, media, and fin-tech. Small start-ups and large multi-nationals have all been part of the fun journey. Most recently, Patrick has provided the vision, advised and directed pragmatic design decisions, and enabled the delivery of innovative products, services and solutions for the Cigna Group of companies. The innovations have improved care coordination, enabled partner interoperability, helped patients/members navigate care, streamlined care delivery, optimized population health management and generally provided efficient self-service digital solutions for those served by the enterprise. Leveraging his experience in software development, systems design, digital business strategy, interoperability and integration, Patrick is a respected mentor and leader. He mentors and advises project teams on making pragmatic, effective and balanced design decisions. This is sometimes an art, more than a science, but here are some key concepts for collaborative design that he practices and prescribes (*)- Decide on when to adopt and adapt existing capabilities vs. chasing the next "shiny object" or technology - Make tradeoffs for "progress vs. perfection"- Iterate and adjust for value - or the "crawl, walk, run” approach - Apply the right architecture patterns and principles to the job at hand (“not everything is a nail") Some of his favourite architecture patterns/principles (but "not the only tools in the toolbox") are- Separation of Concerns - DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)- Bounded Context - Loose Coupling RECOMMENDED BOOKS- Innovation and Healthcare: The Innovator’s Dilemma, and The Innovator’s Prescription - Technology Architecture: The Software Architect Elevator * For a few links to further reading on these topics, see: https://patrickharen.blogspot.com/2025/04/health-tech-reads.html