In President Obama's State of the Union he made several comments about healthcare. Some were vague and point to the fact that change is going to continue to be slow. One good example of this was, "For decades, few things exposed hard-working families to economic hardship more than a broken health care system. And in case you haven’t heard, we’re in the process of fixing that." Yeah. I spent almost 10 years in DC. In my experience, anything the federal government is "in the process of" usually means you'll forget they were working on it well before they make any significant improvements. But I digress...

I see the word "affordable" used in conjunction with "healthcare" a lot. Even more now that there is a little known bill that made its way to law called the "Affordable Care Act."

Warning. The sanity in this post decreases as you scroll down. There. You've been warned.

How's this for a three pack of charts assembled by our friends at the Huffington Post?

When Epic River began planning the build out of the company's new office space at the Rocky Mountain Center of Innovation and Technology, one of the recurring themes was to make the space innovative to mirror the cutting-edge software that has become Epic River's trademark. Teaming with the locally owned and operated Mac Electric Company, the two entities began to share the same vision for an energy efficient lighting system.

When Epic River set out to streamline the medical financing process and provide affordable loans, we knew that we were changing the landscape of medical financing. But hearing from customers like Melissa Grovijohn of Pinnacle Bank reminds us of the daily effect the innovative and easy-to-use software is having in the marketplace. The impact is felt so much that Melissa was compelled to contact us.

In a recent Wired magazine article, "Gadgets Like Fitbit Are Remaking How Doctors Treat You," I was reminded of the quote from the TV show House. The lead character in the show, Dr. Gregory House, M.D., is portrayed as a genius of diagnostic medicine who frequently quips, "Everybody lies." He is generally referring to patients who are being asked difficult personal questions, but the Wired article caused me to consider if that was true about patients in general. For example, do patients listen when a doctor prescribes rest? Does the patient know if they're lying? Is one man's "rest" the same as another? Could activity trackers and heart rate monitors really provide accurate data to the doctors? Could this data be reviewed by the doctor and eliminate follow-up appointments? Does the combination of a sensor-laden super-computer in our pocket and an activity tracker on our wrist allow us to provide real information to our doctors?

I had a conversation with a local medical provider this morning, and after we talked I was more sure than ever that if you're a community bank or a regional bank, the community or communities you serve need your help. Please.

Expanding your footprint into a new market area can be tricky to say the least. Jumping off takes some very fuzzy math and guesswork. We have recently learned from a customer that MyLoans™ Patient Financing can actually take a lot of the guesswork out of opening a new branch and improve the odds of success.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been slowly but sure dominating the cloud hosting world. Today MyLoans™ Healthcare Financing team is proud to announce it now fully supports AWS deployments. Utilizing the Relational Database Service (RDS), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) MyLoans can now be deployed in seconds with no capital outlay for hardware and an infinite ability to support your MyLoans roll out. Amazon's successful execution and audit of nearly every major assurance program has enabled us to provide a cloud delivery option to our financial institution customers while meeting their stringent compliance requirements.