Application Scope

The scope of this survey is focused exclusively on the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai’s educational and research areas and the systems they use. Hospital clinical systems such as EMR and department level technologies including PACS, Pharmacy and others are out of scope.

If you believe your department was inadvertently added to the survey, please let us know at appinventory@mssm.edu.


Packaged Application: Pre-built commercial off the shelf (COTS) software that is installed on a local machine or server and may include specialized calculation capabilities, integration with high-fidelity mannequins, software development tools, imaging editing, content management / web sites, and much more.

Examples of what's in-scope

  • Ancillary research administration systems (e.g., used for separate tracking purposes)

  • Specialized calculation tools or products (e.g., SPSS)

  • Applications supporting research instruments (e.g., high-fidelity mannequins, cameras, microscopes, flowcytometry equipment)

  • High performance computing (HPC) applications (e.g., Scheduler)

  • Custom development software

  • EMRs or other clinical tools / systems not supported by Central or MSSM IT (e.g., dental record system for treating local community members)

  • Other productivity tools (e.g., misc. Software downloaded from the internet. image editing, project management, data analysis tools)

  • Academic content development tools (e.g., course creation)

  • Required vendor specific support software (e.g., research hardware and software supported remotely by the vendor)


Examples of what's not in-scope

  • Software provided by Mount Sinai Central IT (e.g., software installed when the equipment was provisioned, timekeeping, web portals, Microsoft Word, VPN, Teams, endpoint security)

  • Software provided by MSSM IT (e.g., SoM centric applications, core research administration, student success)


Open Source: In the context of MSSM and the research organization, open-source software is most frequently downloaded from the Internet for use in medical related research, computations and related processing. Open-source software is distributed under various license models that typically allows a user to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose at no cost


Custom Application: An application either developed in house or by an outside third party which often includes research or academic specific functionality, custom database / data warehouse, administrative business support functionality, web forms, etc.

Examples of what's in-scope

  • Applications custom developed to support administrative business support processes (e.g., Human Resources, financial reporting, procurement or other)

  • Applications custom developed for research purposes (e.g., analysis tools, special calculations, HPC jobs, research web sites)

  • Applications custom developed for academic purposes (e.g., course learning objectives, peer reviews, evaluation management)


Examples of what's not in-scope

  • Custom software provided by Mount Sinai Central IT or MSSM IT

Infrastructure as a Service: Cloud based infrastructure services utilized for virtual storage, virtual servers, high performance computing, disaster recovery and more. This is often a location for applications or in some cases secure enclaves for controlling and processing highly sensitive information.

Examples of what's in-scope

  • High Performance Computing Platforms (e.g., AWS / IBM / Azure HPC)

  • File sharing applications / File Transfer Sites (FTP)

  • Virtual Machines (VMs) hosting MSSM data or applications

  • Physical machines located at a third-party data center


Examples of what's not in-scope

  • Infrastructure services provided by Mount Sinai Central IT or MSSM IT (e.g., file servers, network / Internet, print management)


Software as a Service: Pre-built cloud-based applications utilized for a multitude of purposes including specialized web sites / blogs / wikis, project management, file sharing, analytics tools, support for research systems / instrumentation, artificial intelligence

Examples of what's in-scope

  • Vendor hosted software (e.g., research analytics, instrumentation interfaces)

  • Vendor hosted datasets (e.g., population health management)

  • Other hosted web sites (e.g., wordpress.com)

  • Other online solutions (e.g., project management tools, application platform as a services (PaaS)


Examples of what's not in-scope

  • Cloud based services provided by Mount Sinai Central IT or MSSM IT (e.g., email services, collaboration sites, mass email tools, learning / student management, lecture capture)