This page is intended to give you a basic idea of what M+H typically undertakes for our clients, which is not to say that we won't consider other options if asked to. We are short on marketing, but long on repeat business: some 3/4 of our slate at any given time is repeat business. We have two different typical engagement profiles: the "hired gun" and the "Solution Provider".

We are all about faster, cheaper, more automatic and less maintenance. We don't do flashy or exotic. This web site is an example of our work: it was produced entirely with our in-house content management system because we had specific requirements, namely:

• We wanted to produce clean, easily rendered HTML

• We wanted the option of automatic PDFs of some pages, because our readers asked for PDFs of the longer pages

• We wanted to run from plain text files, as we have people who work under Windows in a graphical environment, but we also have people who work under UNIX in a character-based environment

• We wanted to be able to publish our content on a number of web servers controlled by others, namely our ISPs. Portability is tough with an off-the-shelf content manager.

Finally, we wanted our web site to give you a real sample of our work. If you find this web site disappointingly lacking in flash animation and the like, then M+H is not for you. If you find this web site comes up quickly on past-its-prime hardware, renders properly under a variety of browsers and is easy to navigate, then keep us in mind if you need to publish data automatically from a database or set of text files.

In a typical hired gun engagement, M+H is asked to provide software development "muscle" to help an organization accomplish a particular task. In such an engagement, we are coming in at a fairly late stage of development and we are doing pretty much what we are told as quickly as we can do it. This is basically contract programming for which our medical informatics and billing backgrounds make us easy to train and our professional experience makes us easy to manage.

The Yale-New Haven Hospital on-line Laboratory Manual and Reference Documents is an example of a hired gun engagement, as well as an example of our no-frills data publishing. The Department of Laboratory Medicine keeps clinical laboratory test information in a database and the reference documents in a word processor format and we gave them an automatic process which publishes that data in HTML.

By its nature, this kind of engagement is high-pressure and short-term and we understand that going in.

In a typical solution provider engagement, we are presented with a particular problem which the organization wants solved quickly and cheaply.

Usually we provide solutions to companies whose main focus is not information systems technology, companies who don't really care how the job gets done, just so long as the job is done effectively, cheaply and reliably.

We provide a soup-to-nuts solution, from problem definition through technical specification, deployment, documentation, training and support. Though we pride ourselves on how little support a typical M+H solution requires.

We are not looking to get our hooks into clients and make them dependent on us forever: we are a small company and don't have the luxury of milking assignments because we need to get onto the next assignment. So we are happy to and good at turning over our work when we are done.

To solve the computer system related problems we are usually asked to solve, we prefer to use "LAMP" (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP or Perl) or Visual BASIC / MS-Access / Windows server O/S's.

We can't crow about these projects on this site because they fill an in-house need and are usually a trade secret.

Check out our What's New page for a sample of what we've been looking into during the last three months.

If you would like a proposal from us, please contact us using the information on our Contacts page. For those of you reading the automatically generated PDF of this document, our contact information is provided on the first page of the PDF.