Ken Henderson kicked off his software career writing code for hospitals, working on code for just about anything a hospital might handle: pharmacy systems, laboratories, insurance, and more. Afterward, he moved to Silicon Valley to pursue software in the advertising sector, but eventually found his way back to healthcare in 2012 by way of Eyefinity^® and has been here ever since.

Today, Ken leads the development of the tools that build, deploy, and track items that go into our system releases, including those for Eyefinity Encompass^TM —almost like the “man behind the curtain” in the Wizard of Oz.

“There’s a lot behind the scenes,” he says. “The end users see those well-designed screens, but it takes a massive effort to get to that screen.”

Looking back on those first conversations about what Encompass would be and what it’s become, Ken believes the decision to offer the platform in the cloud was the right move, and a critical one that enables private practices to better compete with larger retailers.

“Initially we’d been thinking, ‘OK, we can keep the model we’ve used previously in the large retailer space where we’re deploying specific features to specific customers,’ but that slows down our ability to deliver. That’s when we decided to go with a cloud offering that has been incredibly successful for private practice. I think that was the best decision we could have made.”

Even though customers may want to run things on an individual, on-premise level, Ken uses the July 2024 CrowdStrike incident as an example of why that may not be in users’ best interests. Given a problem that affected almost the entire planet, Eyefinity was able to address a handful of issues that affected thousands of practices, rather than having to fix thousands of issues localized to each practice.

“We’ve got experts who do security well,” he says. “If you’ve got 100 enterprise customers, that’s 100 times more people you’d have to train in security and compliance. It’s a lot for users to manage, which is why we do the heavy lifting.”