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Microsoft and GE Partner On Healthcare
theodp writes "Microsoft and General Electric are forming an as-yet-unnamed new health-care technology company. Based near Microsoft's Redmond headquarters, the company will be established next year with about 750 employees drawn from GE, Microsoft and elsewhere. 'High-quality, affordable healthcare is one of the biggest challenges facing every nation, but it's also an area where technology can make a huge difference,' said Steve Ballmer. 'Combining Microsoft's open, interoperable health platforms and software expertise with GE's experience and healthcare solutions will create exciting opportunities for patients and healthcare providers alike. Working together, GE and Microsoft can help make healthcare systems more intelligent and cost efficient while improving patient care.' Has someone been watching those iPad Healthcare case study videos?"
Blue screen of literal death.
An NT user-security ruleset on allowable surgery for the user might be nice tho.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Affordable health care is a pipe dream. The more efficient healthcare becomes the more margin there is for profit. I liken it to the cost of gas...
Hummm, I wonder what's going to happen to all those instances of the PACS Centricity system that GE has deployed. They are all based on a large Sun box, usually a V880, running Solaris and Informix. The systems weren't known for getting along with much else, being that all of the software used to fetch the diagnostic images from the various modalities (PET, CT, X-RAY, etc) was proprietary to GE. Hell, most of their CT machines that were network enabled didn't even support DHCP.
If that whole mess needs to be ported to an MS platform and some version of MSSQL, me thinks that some PACS engineers with Windows and Solaris experience are about to see a couple of very very rich years. I also have a feeling that Siemens' competing product is going to see a boost when the hospital administrators get an estimate of what all that Windows licensing is going to cost, and how many more IT people they are going to have to hire to support it.
Oh god, and if they suddenly want the PACS system to be AD integrated...
healthcare solutions will create exciting opportunities for patients and healthcare providers alike
yeah, exciting. I'm jumping up and down!
these things are not exciting. these things are worrying, but healthcare is never *exciting*. what kind of concept is that??
"lets go to a movie tonite."
"no, how about an amusement park?"
"I got a better idea. lets all get physical exams!"
"yay! physical exams for the lot of us!"
like that will ever happen.
the only ones 'excited' are the ones collecting money each time we are farked over by the system. accountants: they get excited by this crap. normal people simply want the system to do its job then get out of the way and stay out of the way.
exiting. jesus farking christ. I wonder if the author realized how poor a choice of words this really is.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Ask Sun what it was like working with GE on the Genesis project in the 80s.
Wait, is this Microsoft?
Carry on, then.
Now that MS and GE are in health care . . .
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/oblivious-supreme-court-poised-to-legalize-medical-patents.ars
The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in a case that raises a fundamental question: whether a physician can infringe a patent merely by using scientific research to inform her treatment decisions.
Unfortunately, this issue was barely mentioned in Wednesday's arguments. A number of influential organizations had filed briefs warning of the dire consequences of allowing medical patents, but their arguments were largely ignored in the courtroom. Instead, everyone seemed to agree that medical patents were legal in general, and focused on the narrow question of whether the specific patent in the case was overly broad.
This should make the nation's doctors extremely nervous. For two decades, the software industry has struggled with the harmful effects of patents on software. In contrast, doctors have traditionally been free to practice medicine without worrying about whether their treatment decisions run afoul of someone's patent. Now the Supreme Court seems poised to expand patent law into the medical profession, where it's unlikely to work any better than it has in software.
Wow - either Ballmer is an A-grade ignoramus or (more likely) an A-grade liar!
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
Has someone been watching those iPad Healthcare case study videos?
Um, no. Someone has been producing actual healthcare products.
The PHR space is going to explode I believe as people start to shop around for affordable healthcare. This is one area I see where a small amount of technology can help the lives of millions of people. No more $100 xrays at every dentist you visit. Expensive diagnostics follow you around as long as they're valid. Less lost records and information 'silos' between doctors and labs.
This is one product I really hope Microsoft succeeds in.
When I read "Combining Microsoft's open, interoperable health platforms and software expertise with..." I laughed out loud, then I choked.
I guess they define "open" and "interoperable" from some dictionary that reverses normal language from the equation.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It appears you are attempting to run a powerful cancer therapy machine. .........
Would you like me to:
1) Burn a hole through the patient
2) Turn on the operator
3) Target everything except "Tumor area" and send the bill to the patient
I'm sorry, you cannot do any of those functions. Your Microsoft Gold certified licence key has expired. Reschedule patient for 2050.
Piracy is very important to Microsoft. Please call 1-800-Pay-More to re-active your license key. Have your documentation with you, including any
receipts, and necessary credit cards. Expect a 90-120 minute delay during weekdays.
Against software patents, against open source, and against competition.
... and then health care costs will drop. Basic insurance plans will start to makes sense as providers known they only have to cover emergencies/unpreventable diseases/etc.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Add General Motors to the mix!
Then you've united the Three Dinosaurs of the Apocalypse.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
... why in the world would they want to partner with Microsoft?
The real issue is how you actually design and then build the application. To date I have seen nothing from software companies that really supports the way health care professionals actually work (the design) - I have seen stuff done by health care professionals that is impressive. I would also suggest that using a 'software machine' would be more productive for the development phase (zero cost of coding) and also maintaining a single specification file is easier than millions lines of code.
The notion of an 'ERP' for a hospital is a joke - no processes, no effective security of data, etc. What is wanted is a highly collaborative system that has the notion of a 'patient project' at its core and treats each patient experience in a hospital, clinic, care centre, etc, as and ongoing activity whereby actors (Doctors, Nurses, other specialists, etc) join the project as and when they are required. In this world there would only be one record for the patient instead of the mess we have now whereby records are scattered in multiple disconnected crap systems.
The University of Sydney undertook a survey of the state of 'e' health and it is a great read as to the poverty of what is being imposed on hospitals and putting all of us at risk and after $20billion has been spent in UK the health care professional's assessment of the 'project' in a 600+ page report is that 'e' would help health care delivery if someone could get it to work.
First Bill Gates gives you cancer with his nuclear reactors, then Microsoft cures you! Nice try, fascists!
Yeah, when I was a kid my dad was a VP at GE. That is until another VP sabotaged my dad's career and got him busted to cleaning bathrooms as it were. GE encourages that kind of "competitive energy". So we paid for GE on the way up because dad was never around then on the way down because we were broke. I won't get in to what it did to the family.
Those people would make half their employees eat the other half's babies if there was money in it. Health care? The only thing GE knows about medicine is the most efficient way to suck peoples' blood out of their veins.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
"Microsoft's open, interoperable health platforms and software expertise"
That definition is the opposite of Microsoft.
Okay, so Microsoft is extending the their entertainment systems to new area. I already use their products as platform for my Star Craft II, but would rather not choose their products for anything that is business or mission critical.
The electronic medical record business is an absolute mess. One of the natural roles of government is the setting of standards. But while the rest of the medical field is piled high with regulation upon regulation, in this one field the government has decided decided to stand aside.
Dozens of different systems in use that theoretically should be able to talk to each other, but in practice reliant on format converters written by vendors that have a vested interest in making life difficult for competing vendors. And with each additional vendor, a geometrically increase in the possible permutations of formats to be converted.
My prediction for this merger? http://xkcd.com/927
the concept isn't foreign but its morally wrong. how dare anyone make a profit off the ill.
its like taxing disabled people more because they're disabled
one of our products was forced to be on MS (2-3x the price of Unix and support costs of 5x). Since it went down so often, we said that it had the 'blue screams of death'.
So, GE has moved a bunch of the health care production to China, combined with work with MS.
I would say that the two actions will bring new literal meaning to that saying.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Now Microsoft is now a competitor to every other PACS and medical imaging provider. We are talking Toshiba, Philips & Siemens just to name a few not so small companies.
Not a good move MS.
OS companies should stick to their knitting.
it's GE and Microsoft. I'm sure someone has already used the Blue Screen of Death joke, but quite frankly, yeah. There is far too much with Microsoft in it that doesn't need it as it is; we don't need to extend it to where DEATH is a failure condition.
The Centricity product line is such a non-integrated fugly and clunky Kludge that MS can only make it better.....
I think this might be the exit from the Enterprise EMR market that I have been saying GE will perform since their customers are dumping them for Cerner and EPIC.
GE does more than imaging... they are in EMR as well and those products blow.
Sadly, I can imagine it now:
Body on slab.
Toe tagged.
Toe tag and Coroner's report reads: "Death due to life support medical device BSOD."
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
GE's EMR is highly advanced, is microsoft centric, and one of the few working solutions in the world at the system's / enterprise level.
The problem is that the last time I looked, it was 50-100K / physician.
how I'm going to die.
>"'Combining Microsoft's open, interoperable health platforms"
Open? Sorry, that just doesn't quite fit for me. Maybe it is more open than ancient mainframe based stuff, but that is still not the word I would pick. "Interoperable" isn't much better- so they will support non-MS-Windows-based servers or clients?
Great - so we couple the bribery power of GE and Microsoft and the corruption of the health care industry - That's Winning!
Mod funny. People who live unhealthy and risky lives die faster, therefore cause less healthcare costs.
What the hell are the mods smoking and where can I get some?
Spend any time on Google and look at the vast swathes of evidence that socialised healthcare systems are not only *at least* twice as cheap in terms of GDP per capita than the US system, but that they're affordable and a massive boon to the countries that have them (that would be every developed nation except the US).
Sure, nothing is perfect - the UK's system needs some serious TLC after an 18 year stretch starting in the 80s under a Tory government that wanted to kill it but without committing political suicide, so they let it drown in neglect - something it is still recovering from, along with further management gaffes in the 2000's, but overall there's plenty of data on all the countries that run socialised healthcare systems that it works well and it works affordably.
I love many things about the US (I have lived there), but your backwards healthcare system that is designed almost exclusively for the profit of insurance and medical companies is not one of them. The sooner you move to a single payer system (with private insurance still available, just like in the UK, for those who can afford to choose it if they want) the better you'll all be. It'll save you money too.
It's a little scary to post dogma-busting facts in a forum full of software engineers drunk on Libertarian* Kool-Aid, but here goes:
For at least a decade, the organization that has delivered the highest-quality care in the United States and delivered the best outcomes at the lowest cost is ... the Veterans Health Administration. (I know some readers will want to shoot back with anecdotal and outlier horror stories, and point out weaknesses in specific areas such as treatment of PTSD. All systems have them. The fact is that the VHA outscores every other health-care operation in the United States on overall quality of care.) The VHA's dramatic turnaround is due in no small part to its superb patient and records management software, VistA, which it developed in-house and is open source, public domain, and free to be adopted and adapted by anyone who cares to.
For more information on VistA, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA
For more information on the truth about the VHA, see:
Phillip Longman, The Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours (2nd ed.)
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Care-Anywhere-2nd-Health/dp/0982417152/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
- OR -
http://goo.gl/J5cmQ
and the article on which the book was based:
Phillip Longman, The Best Care Anywhere
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0501.longman.html
- OR -
http://goo.gl/EAJn5
In sum, the country's most socialized, most government-run health-care operation is actually delivering better care for less money than any wholly or partially private-sector operation, and the open-source patient and records managment software it developed is first-rate. But don't worry, Libertarians: since the top priority in US health-care systems design is to create the maximum opportunity for skimming, gouging, and profit-making rather than to deliver the best care at the lowest cost to the most people, I expect GE/Microsoft's proprietary system will do very well in the market.
* I graduated with distinction from a predominately Libertarian econ department. However (to the dismay of some of my normatively oriented professors, no doubt), I never gave up on evidence-based reasoning.