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This is one of the interesting differences I've noticed between my first-world and underserved colleagues. The former think a stethoscope is a quaint fashion accessory. The latter look at it as an indispensable diagnostic tool. After all, who cares about hearing a little murmur if you have an ultrasound in your pocket and can assess ejection function on the fly?

My colleagues in Gaza have sharper clinical skills for exactly this reason, and it's why they need these tools.

tarek : )

I think this very much is an Intel ad. I was curious, because this sounded familiar, so I looked it up. From the press release and GE's white paper, it looks like their system:
Uses 25 mAs dose (75% less than standard, they say)
Is ready in an hour, 100 times faster than when they started in 2006 (so 6-10x of that speedup is Moore's Law, the other 10-16x is algorithm improvement)
Uses 28 quad-core Xeons

On the other hand, a GPU solution from 2 years ago:
Gives a 2-4 mAs dose (97-99% less than standard, they say)
Is ready in 1-2 minutes, 100 times faster than contemporary CPU algorithms
Uses a single GPU

Better, faster, cheaper... Pick three.

here is where the industrial kicks in

And you asked where I work? We affectionately refer to it as Man's Greatest Hospital

19. "Medicine" means allopathic medicine as practiced by the recipient of a degree of doctor of medicine.

- AZRS 32-1401. Definitions

This is probably my biggest beef with Epic and other Mumps-based apps that use a bloated client. There's just no need for it. IDX http://www.gehealthcare.com/usen/hit/products/cent ricity_business/index.html has a very nice Web front-end that does everything in a browser (albeit with unnecessary IE dependencies). Epic has a thick VB6.0 client and CPRS (The VAs VistA GUI http://www.hardhats.org/) is massive.

I know it's a lot of code to re-write, but it's not like vendors need to throw out the database code. Just fix a mistake made 10 years ago, not the one from 1964. Cache allows for some nice things in a browser based app (XEN? SVG?). Having that kind of UI really helps to manage desktops in a distributed environment like a hospital.

There is a Computerworld article from the previous slashdot story that seems pretty helpful in understanding the meltdown of their electronic medical records systems. They say that they are running the world's largest Citrix server system, and it does not scale well for their purposes.

As someone who has been frustrated by a variety of Electronic Medical Records systems in different medical settings, I must say that my "favorite" has been VistA (the medical records software used by the Veteran's Administration, and no relation to Microsoft Vista). Currently, I'm using GE's Centricity at my work site and have had some minor problems that have resulted in delays in entering my data. (Problems with VistA were more related to the entire network being down - problems with Centricty have been with database connectivity... I wish I could say more about it, but I'm not an IT person, I'm just a lowly end-user).

I'm curious what you mean by "forming an image of what is going on under water from sound (not sonar... I'm talking about real imaging)".

I think he's talking about something more along the lines of what they're calling a 3D/4D ultrasound. That doesn't mean much unless you've recently had a child, so here's an example from GE (requires flash). For a non-flash example, just google for 4d ultrasound and try a few of the links...

The images are not in color, and sometimes you lose detail as an elbow (think whale) gets too close to the transducer. But with more processing power and better transducers, kinks like that should go away...

This article is informative and all, but it doesn't give us techies much insight on the companies that are providing the IT behind these major healthcare organizations. There are a handful of major vendors out there, and a lot of smaller ones. These vendors not only create jobs in their cities, but require the facilities that use the software to hire teams of tech savvy individuals. Only a small percentage of hospitals are using Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and the process for health care organizations to convert from paper charts can sometimes take years. These roll outs give a lot of jobs to consultants too. I'm really surprised the article didn't mention that. I was trying to think of some good links I could give you all that would list some major vendors, but I can't think of what would be fair since I work for a vendor that supplied a software to a number of the healthcare organizations mentioned in the article.

Here's a link to HIS talk though, it's a forum for those of us in the healthcare IT industry.

http://histalk.blog-city.com/

If you read it you'll see a lot of company names repeated, in alphabetical order here are a few of the big ones that come to mind (difinitely not a comprehensive list): Cerner, Epic Systems Corp., GE Healthcare, McKesson,

I'm a radiologist, and I'm calling bullshit on you.

I suspect you work for GE Healthcare. There are only two "American MR manufacturers" left, as far as I know, and that's GE and Fonar. All the rest are made by the Japanese (Toshiba, Hitachi) or Europeans (Siemens, Philips.)

I think GE is at least twenty times as big as Fonar, and I'm not even sure Fonar's smaller specialty machines cost the "million dollars" you assert in the first place, so you must be a GE man. GE's general purpose magnets certainly do cost a million or more, and they are definitely worth it.

GE and Fonar make excellent equipment, and their MR images are outstanding. They can compete with any of the other makers. Most of our scanners are GE.

Your assertion about poor quality components makes no financial sense for GE or any other manufacturer, because almost everybody who buys an MR also gets a service contract to replace broken or faulty components. This is a major profit center for the company.

If makers were putting faulty equipment into their machines, we would be seeing the effects in poor image quality. These are some of the most sensitive and carefully calibrated electronic instruments ever made.

If I see image artifacts leading to poor quality scans, it means I am on the phone to my GE field service engineer in about fifteen seconds, and he better get his ass out to my office like NOW and fix whatever is wrong, because I'm not scanning patients until it's fixed.

Repeated service contract calls for shitty components means the maker loses big bucks. Labor is a lot more expensive than materials, as your own figures show. A company that did business as you assert would soon be at a competitive disadvantage.

Two other points:

1) If what you say is correct, you could file a qui tam lawsuit and win tens of milions of dollars. Defrauding Medicare or the FDA is a serious crime and those who blow the whistle on it earn big rewards. Huge rewards. So put up or shut up.

Everybody else, wait for news of his lawsuit any day now. If it doesn't come, you can safely assume that this guy is a poorly informed factory-floor peon, just a disgruntled big-mouth, talking out his ass. Not only that, but if what he says is true, he's as greedy as the corporate honchos he condemns, sweeping it under the rug so his job's not threatened. He's either a liar, or a greedy coward, or maybe both, that's all there is to it. I've got a mind to let my pal at GE, Jim Rapp, know what kind of dirtbag they have in their QC group.

2) Your assessment of the cost structure and profit margin of the MR's your company sells is faulty. I don't see you taking R & D, software, computer workstations, or FDA certification expenses into account, never mind sales or marketing or shipping costs.

I'm sure there is a fat profit margin on MR scanners, but it's more like 30 or 40 percent than the 300 percent you are implying.

These million-dollar machines scan fifteen or twenty sick patients a day, for eight to twelve years of useful life. They each save tens of millions of health care dollars during this time, speeding diagnoses, shortening hospital stays, and preventing unnecessary or futile surgery.

It is to every patient's advantage to make sure there are many strong device makers, competing vigorously, and investing big money in research and development.

Three cheers for capitalism and greedy corporations. They may save your ungrateful life someday.

You're looking for this.

AFAIK Philips and Siemens both use Windows based platforms. Yuck.

GE will try to keep its revenue up by downplaying the usefulness of LEDs, promoting its bulbs as a more long-lasting and dependable resource used for decades.

You win the award for Most Clueless Asshat for 4/16/2005.

Do you think lightbulbs sales really concern Jeff Immelt?

Yeah, GE has a reputation for relying on "legacy" technology and standing in the way of technical advances. We'll ignore the following products lines:
http://www.gehealthcare.com/usen/index.html
http://www.ge.com/en/product/business/aviation.htm
http://www.ge.com/en/product/business/transport.ht m
and the list goes on....

You, sir, are a retard. Did you think that GE's net income of $4.04 BILLION is composed mainly of lightbulb sales?

Microsoft as world leader? I guess you've never witnessed such behemoths as GE, Disney and Time/Warner.

How about flying to Universal Studios, having a heart attack from all the flashing lights( do they make lights though?), getting an ECG at the hospital while watching the news story about your accident on TV?

Yes, all that and more courtesy just one might conglomorate. If only I wasn't lazy I'm sure I could have double the examples at least.

I am a biomedical engineer at a USN&WR top 20 hospital, working in the cardiology-related departments. We do have medical devices, including patient monitors, that run in Windows OS's. One is the Witt Biomedical monitors we have in our adult cardiac cath lab. The software was originally written to run on MS-DOS and really only runs on Windows 2000 to provide a GUI for the nurses to point-n-click. It uses Windows file sharing but doesn't even utilize print services. The whole thing should have been rewritten about ten years ago but Witt already has over 25% market share and is trying to compete with the big dogs like GEMS (GE Medical Systems) and Siemens. The old Siemens Cathcor monitors we used to have ran on *nix but the brand spankin' new GEMS Combolab we got for our pediatric cath lab runs on Windows XP for the nursing stations and Windows 2003 for the servers. The Siemens Axiom Artis x-ray angiography systems in our adult cath lab runs a mix of OS's, such as Windows NT (soon to be XP) on the Host-PC, Vertex on the Real Time PC, Neutrino on the Real Time Controller (the truly patient critical part), and Windows CE on touch panels and displays. Siemens will tell you all about their "revolutionary OS" called Syngo that will, to paraphrase, "provide one user interface for all imaging modalities" but it's really just running on top of Windows NT/XP. The intravascular ultrasound machine that we have, a Boston Scientific Galaxy runs on Windows NT. Even the Kodak laser printer we have for printing on x-ray film has a DICOM server running Windows NT. All of this runs on the hospital's open network and has been disconnected for either being actively infected with a virus or for not being patched.

Now a lot of our stuff is not Windows based. Most of it I don't know what OS it does run on (perhaps proprietary information) but I can say it doesn't appear to be Windows. Philips Intellivue MP90 networked patient monitors, Datascope CS 100 intra-aortic ballon pumps, and Worldheart Novacor left ventricular assist sytem (think artifical heart) all have their own software. Some systems that use 3D modeling, like the Endocardial Solutions Ensite 3000 use SGI workstations and software.

Many of the CT and MRI scanners I see, patient monitors we put in, anesthesia carts we employ use non-Windows operating systems, not because Windows is considered unstable or insecure, but because medical IT is so far behind due to the years it takes to get FDA approval on new equipment. Many new systems do use Windows because it's easy to work with and easily networked. For instance, one cool new system (the company and name I don't know) allows an anesthesiologist (who monitors 3-4 CRNA's in as many OR's) to see blood gas waveforms and other vital signs on one of those little clear screens three inches in front of your eye. It uses Wi-Fi to transmit the data to a Windows embedded device in the doctor's fanny pack. It goes without saying that we have incredible signal strength on our wireless network all over the OR area; you wouldn't want a dropped connection there! All of our clinical workstations and every office computer is Windows NT or XP.

I cou