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?"

Comments

Sign...might as well get it over with

[zill]

Blue screen of literal death.

Re:Sign...might as well get it over with

[Anonymous Coward]

"...Microsoft...will create exciting opportunities for patients and healthcare providers alike."

I think a BSOD would be pretty exciting.

Re:Sign...might as well get it over with

[blair1q]

I haven't seen a BSOD in a long while. But the past several times I thought my computer was beyond dead, a reboot, or a repair with the repair DVD, brought it back to life.

So, really, I'm hoping they luck into that, just to get rid of the wailing of the relatives of the deceased on the customer-service line.

Re:Sign...might as well get it over with

[ScrewMaster]

Blue screen of literal death.

Yes, because when I think of efficient, reasonable-priced, effective health care delivery ... I think GE and Microsoft.

This isn't going to end well. Not for their customers at any rate.

Re:Sign...might as well get it over with

[ScrewMaster]

I haven't seen a BSOD in a long while.

Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they didn't happen.

Windows 7 is configured by default to restart immediately after a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) or other major system problem. This reboot usually happens too fast to see the error message on screen.

I've had Windows 7 BSOD (actually, I've seen a few different colors), usually because of a driver problem at startup. The last one was due to a multi-port USB -> RS232/485 serial converter. Installed the drivers and *POW*, instant BSOD when we restarted the system. To Win7's credit, we let it run an automatic repair (which took about an hour) and when it was done everything worked fine. I have no idea what it did, but it did manage to fix itself.

The converter used an FTDI chipset: I've had driver issues with those things before, on a number of products from different vendors that all used one of FTDI's chipsets.

Re:Sign...might as well get it over with

[Aryden]

Yes, but you would still see the reboot and know something went kaboom

Re:Sign...might as well get it over with

[ozmanjusri]

Don't worry, it'll only be for Buddhists.

Everyone knows the only way to fix a Microsoft product is to reboot...

Re:Sign...might as well get it over with

[LordLimecat]

BSODs are almost always a result of a bad driver, a bad piece of hardware, bad firmware, or a bad 3rd party service.

Basically, pretty much similar to a crash on any other modern OS, it is very very rarely caused by a kernel bug. If youre getting BSODs, update your damn drivers or choose another, less crappy hardware vendor.

Re:Sign...might as well get it over with

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they didn't happen. [about.com]

I haven't seen a Windows 7 BSOD yet. Is one of the new features of this OS that it brings back all apps I had running to the state they were in before the crash happened?

Re:Sign...might as well get it over with

[jo_ham]

He's not wrong though, is he?

  I thought slashdot was a tech literate site? This stuff is hardly rocket science.

Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot the party line... my mistake. Microsoft evul! Microsoft shitty! Rar!

Re:Sign...might as well get it over with

[dak664]

By default a crash minidump is created with a link in the action center or event viewer. WinDbg gives a quick summary if you download or link to the MS online symbol database:

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (d1)
An attempt was made to access a pageable (or completely invalid) address at an
interrupt request level (IRQL) that is too high. This is usually
caused by drivers using improper addresses.
Arguments:
Arg1: fffffa80b2c49bdf, memory referenced
Arg2: 0000000000000002, IRQL
Arg3: 0000000000000000, value 0 = read operation, 1 = write operation
Arg4: fffff880089b2247, address which referenced memory
RNDISMPX+5247
fffff880`089b2247 41397804 cmp dword ptr [r8+4],edi
FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: X64_0xD1_RNDISMPX!ReceivePacketMessage+22f

Re:Sign...might as well get it over with

[LordLimecat]

Ignorant troll is ignorant. You have any examples of a BSOD not caused by buggy drivers or a crappy antivirus package? Cause I havent seen one in 5 years.

Re:Sign...might as well get it over with

[celle]

" I think GE and Microsoft."

Great people who build bombs(nuclear) and people who build virtual bombs(windows) working together to build a better America. -- pseudo carlin

CAT Scan BSOD?

[BMOC]

An NT user-security ruleset on allowable surgery for the user might be nice tho.

Pipe dream

[U8MyData]

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...

Re:Pipe dream

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Where I live health care is free. And I know, TANSTAFL, we pay through taxes, but it has still proven to be a more effective system. See point 3 and 4 here: http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/08/five_myths_about_health_care_a.html

Re:Pipe dream

[InsightIn140Bytes]

In Europe health care is usually paid by everyone in form of taxes, and if you have to go to hospital, government pays large amount of price. This is especially true for costly operations, ICU (where one night costs something like 1000e) or if you have to spend long times in hospital. It does have its own problems (everyone must pay for the health care no matter if they used the services or not), but if something happens then it really is affordable to everyone.

Re:Pipe dream

[BMOC]

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...

I think you mean invested in marketing new wonder drugs not efficient.

Re:Pipe dream

[Anonymous Coward]

In Europe health care is usually paid by everyone in form of taxes, and if you have to go to hospital, government pays large amount of price. This is especially true for costly operations, ICU (where one night costs something like 1000e) or if you have to spend long times in hospital. It does have its own problems (everyone must pay for the health care no matter if they used the services or not), but if something happens then it really is affordable to everyone.

And health care resource allocations are determined by bureaucrats.

In the US, the same ones that run things like the TSA.

Yeah, that'll be an improvement.

Re:Pipe dream

[0123456]

Affordable health care is a pipe dream.

So long as you let government control it, yes.

The more efficient healthcare becomes the more margin there is for profit.

Only so long as you let government keep competition out of the market (e.g. by requiring vastly complex drug tests and keeping the supply of doctors artificially low).

Re:Pipe dream

[Archangel Michael]

The problem with affordable healthcare, is not realizing how affordable healthcare has really become, multiplied by the obfuscated cost structures (Insurance).

Simply put, we take for granted the "HealthCare" we have that is cheap (or even free), while bemoaning that which seems out of reach except by contracting through third party cost reducers (Insurance Co).

When you have a company skimming off the top a large percentage, while increasing costs and overhead required by Doctors (who increase prices to cover those costs), you end up with the monstrosity we have today.

To fix the problem, we must first de-obfuscate pricing in healthcare .

Re:Pipe dream

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who often thinks liberally, I have to admit that the current financial crisis in parts of europe challenge the feasibility of such systems.

Re:Pipe dream

[timeOday]

All the countries with socialized medicine pay less for health care than we do. It's pointless expressing your opinion without at least addressing the fact that it flies in the face of all evidence.

Re:Pipe dream

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in BC, Canada it works like this:
Emergencies go NOW.
Everyone else goes on the list in FIFO order. If I remember correctly, if you cancel you go back to the end of the line.
My Wife was on the Gall Bladder removal list for about 5 months before she had it out. The doctors told here if she wanted it out sooner, have a big greasy meal to trigger an attack and have it done as an emergency. She chose to wait. On the day of her surgery I dropped her off at the hospital in the morning. I picked her up late afternoon. No money exchanged hands. A couple of days later she felt great.
I'm an American living in Canada for almost 18 years now. I'll gladly take Canadian health care over US health care. You need to go to a doctor? GO. You don't worry about figuring out how to pay for it. No crappy HMO telling you you can't go to your preferred doctor. The only shortcomings are waiting times, but if it's an emergency you get taken care of NOW.

Too bad it doesn't cover dental.

Re:Pipe dream

[blair1q]

That's only true if you are one of those dopes who believes that price and profit can't be regulated.

The medical economy can work in one of two ways:

1) I have to lower prices as costs go down or my competitors will and I won't get any revenue at all and I'll go out of business.

2) I have to lower prices as costs go down or the government will slap me with a big fine and take away my license and I'll go out of business.

The reason (1) doesn't happen now is because the GOVERNMENT often gives medical-industry participants a patent or license that prevents competitors from getting into their field of speciality. Since it's the government that creates the scarcity and thus the opportunity for excess profit, then the government has every right to take its share of the value from that and either tax you down to a nominal yet lucrative profit, or fine you into lowering your prices to that level, i.e., system (2).

Right now, the people in the medical industry know full well that (2) can be implemented if the democracy only figures out that we have the power to impose it, so they spend a lot of money keeping the democracy from figuring that out. Not least by falsely demonizing government control of the economy (which they're only too glad to have in the case of the patents and licenses, etc.) and by generally tearing down government so it has little power to interfere.

And if a weak government and expensive healthcare mean more people are sick and the sick are more desperate, well, that's just synergistic with their goal of squeezing every last dollar out of anyone who prefers being broke to being dead.

Re:Pipe dream

[Anonymous Coward]

GM drove itself out of business. You take financial risk because you are a gambler; your participation in the economy is for your own benefit alone, and any taxes anyone takes from it are because the government protects you from being knocked down and robbed every time you go to the beach, or otherwise boiled and eaten alive.

In summary, fuck you. Saving lives is a duty we all share, and if you can't be bothered to part with your taxes to support that, and still be left with more money than anyone you're saving with it, then we might as well carve the meat from your bones and slather it with sugary sauce and laugh at the irony of you suddenly calling for the government's police to save you.

Re:Pipe dream

[roman_mir]

USA had affordable private health care prior to 1965, people preferred it to Blue Cross / Shield. You can read it in my journal, there are links to data there too.

What makes health care expensive is government money. Same thing that makes education expensive.

Re:Pipe dream

[squidflakes]

And in the US health care resource allocations are determined by corporate drones who get bonuses for saving the company money i.e. denying treatments when they cost the insurance company.

I'll take a bureaucrat

Re:Pipe dream

[DigiShaman]

AKA death panels. Insurance companies already act in this manor anyways. So the concept isn't anything new. But the problem does occur in how this now provides an alternate source of political power. Who lives, who dies. Oh and BTW, vote for me or my opponent will start killing children through bad policy. As you can see, it gets extreme ugly very quickly.

Re:Pipe dream

[hondo77]

Affordable health care is a pipe dream.

So long as you let government control it, yes.

What color is the sky in your world? Healthcare is affordable in those countries where the government is controlling it (which is pretty much everywhere but the United States, where it is no longer affordable).

Re:Pipe dream

[Hatta]

Affordable capitalist health care is a pipe dream.

Re:Pipe dream

[TheGratefulNet]

And health care resource allocations are determined by bureaucrats.

uhm, they have been for as long as I can remember. they are called insurance companies and they are not doctors, they don't employ doctors and they make decisions on your behalf without any way to fight it, other than to 'take your business elsewhere' (yeah, right).

what I could get done has NEVER been a choice between me and my doctor, if it involved any kind of health insurance.

you folks who are scared of the government; why would they be any worse than the profit oriented HC companies??

either way, someone 'big' will decide things for you. I'd rather it not be directly via insurance companies.

Re:Pipe dream

[ScrewMaster]

In the US, the same ones that run things like the TSA.

That, actually, is the crux of the matter. Any discussion of whether socialized medicine is "better" or "worse" than private insurance must take into account the relative trustworthiness of a given country's bureaucracy. Ours has proven itself, time and time again, that it cannot be trusted with our money. Neither, unfortunately, can our private insurers, which leaves us in something of a bind. The solution to such problems has traditionally been heavily-regulated private-sector organizations providing the actual service, with the government making damn sure they do it right. The heavily corporatist leanings of our current regime makes that unworkable, and the idea of giving those 535 sociopaths collectively known as "Congress" complete control over our health care is not a viable solution here either. That should scare anyone who is paying attention to what the United States Federal Government has become, that is, a danger to itself and everyone subject to it.

When you get right down to cases, insurance of any kind is fundamentally socialist in nature. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea of many paying into the kitty, and some withdrawing in time of need. A number of very large corporations self-insure their employees: that can work out much better than private insurance. In any event, the issue is primarily one of administration: Germany, for example, does very well with socialized medicine because they have a fundamentally more trustworthy bureaucratic setup than the United States has ever had. Consequently, socializing our medical system, especially the way Obama wants to do it, is probably doomed to failure. Even if it proves effective, odds are it will be so expensive that we'll go broke trying to maintain it.

Re:Pipe dream

[sexconker]

Here in BC, Canada it works like this:
Emergencies go NOW.
Everyone else goes on the list in FIFO order. If I remember correctly, if you cancel you go back to the end of the line.
My Wife was on the Gall Bladder removal list for about 5 months before she had it out. The doctors told here if she wanted it out sooner, have a big greasy meal to trigger an attack and have it done as an emergency. She chose to wait. On the day of her surgery I dropped her off at the hospital in the morning. I picked her up late afternoon. No money exchanged hands. A couple of days later she felt great.
I'm an American living in Canada for almost 18 years now. I'll gladly take Canadian health care over US health care. You need to go to a doctor? GO. You don't worry about figuring out how to pay for it. No crappy HMO telling you you can't go to your preferred doctor. The only shortcomings are waiting times, but if it's an emergency you get taken care of NOW.

Too bad it doesn't cover dental.

So suffering with a condition for 5 months (or risking serious injury or death by waiting for it to become an emergency) is good?
I'd rather pay and get my problem fixed now.

Yes, it sucks for those who can't pay, but health care is a finite resource and finite quality. So the options are "free" with longer waits and same or reduced quality, or expensive with shorter waits and same or better quality. When it comes to my health, I know which one I'll choose every time.

I'll bitch about it being super expensive when it only needs to be moderately expensive.
I'll bitch if my provider tries to deny coverage when I should be covered.
I'll bitch when the pharmaceutical companies do shysty shit.
But please don't mistake my bitching as a desire to have government run or publicly funded health care. (And don't take this statement to point out Medicare, because that is forced upon me and I don't like it.)

Re:Pipe dream

[sexconker]

As someone who often thinks logically, I must say that the constant crisis in Europe challenges the feasibility of Europe.

Re:Pipe dream

[sexconker]

GM drove itself out of business. You take financial risk because you are a gambler; your participation in the economy is for your own benefit alone, and any taxes anyone takes from it are because the government protects you from being knocked down and robbed every time you go to the beach, or otherwise boiled and eaten alive.

In summary, fuck you. Saving lives is a duty we all share, and if you can't be bothered to part with your taxes to support that, and still be left with more money than anyone you're saving with it, then we might as well carve the meat from your bones and slather it with sugary sauce and laugh at the irony of you suddenly calling for the government's police to save you.

GM fucked itself over because they signed UAW contracts.
They should have fired the entire represented workforce and hired off the streets a decade ago.

Re:Pipe dream

[Luckyo]

False. The only thing you need to do is COMPARE your private sector option with a public one. There is no absolute, only relative comparison between the two.

From what I heard, seems like your private sector has proven, time and time again to be far more cruel, far more (self)destructive and far more egoistical then public one.

Re:Pipe dream

[Luckyo]

Last I checked, money can't buy you ability to sink continents.

And with trolling done, crisis has done nothing to challenged feasibility of EU - if anything it increased it. It's the EMU that's in question.

Re:Pipe dream

[Luckyo]

And stating the fact is apparently "flamebait". Oh slashdot...

Re:Pipe dream

[timeOday]

Actually it's a misnomer to say health care is rationed by corporate bureaucrats in the US - that's only for the ones well off enough to have health insurance. For the poor, health care allocations are pre-determined: you get nothing, outside of possibly fatal emergencies.

Re:Pipe dream

[Aryden]

How about an option where, instead of the government spending $900,000,000,000 per her on subsidies, we just deposit it to an HSA. The longer you stay healthy the more you have incase of a catastrophic event.

Re:Pipe dream

[Zebai]

Make it easier (reduce the cost, even subsidize if necessary) to become a doctor so that we can get more of them competing against each other. Help reduce operating costs for doctors so they can run at a profit without charging as much (limit the damages for litigation etc...). Force health insurance companies to compete for customers by not allowing employers to choose the company for them (public exchanges would be fine without a state subsidized plan running companies out of business). This would allow individuals without decent employers to get better rates. Remove insane requirements to force health plans to cover certain things, If i don't want to buy a plan that covers therapy, pregnancy, and optional procedures then so be it let me buy the cheaper plan.

Re:Pipe dream

[Stormthirst]

It is debatable that American healthcare is better quality from other countries
And they aren't the only ones saying it either
Even the World Health Organisation says so

A very simply Google will demonstrate that American Healthcare is just as good as elsewhere, and yet costs twice as much as any where else.

Please explain this?

Re:Pipe dream

[Stormthirst]

America is the only place in the first world with death panels

Re:Pipe dream

[Anonymous Coward]

We could make sweeping conclusions about the Canadian healthcare system using a handful of anecdotes from an anonymous poster. Or we could look at statistics from the Canadian Institute for Health Information. For province-by-province wait times, look here. The section on bypass surgery starts on page 26. For Ontario, Canada's most populous province, the median wait time in the reporting period (April 1 to September 30, 2010) was under 10 days, and the 90th percentile was about 40 days.

Re:Pipe dream

[ChatHuant]

Affordable health care is a pipe dream.

So long as you let government control it, yes.

That's just a right-wing talking point, and not a very good one either. A particular American blind spot is the weird concept that the free unregulated market solves every single problem under the sun. The unexamined application of this idea leads to situations like the health care mess.

Competition in a relatively free market has repeteadely been proven to be the best way to maximize profit. I want to posit that profit maximization is NOT what we want in health care. What we want is HEALTH maximization over the whole population of the country, Applying market rules to health care will not provide the best health; what it will provide instead is maximum profits for the participants that stand to profit. It's easy to see this is true, by comparing the results of the USA system with the situation elsewhere. It's been noted again and again that the USA spends more and gets worse results than most other developed countries. This is a direct result of the fact that the health care system in the USA is geared towards making money, while in other countries it's more focused upon making health.
 
One good example is the attitude towards prevention: in most cases, prophylaxis is much cheaper than the treatment of the actual disease. In other countries, where regular doctor consultations and preventive treatment are mostly free, lots of people don't develop the disease. In the USA, an uninsured person (and there are tens of millions) may not normally get regular physicals (because they're expensive). Some of them will go on and contract the (preventable) disease, and then be forced to use emergency services. Everybody loses: the patient is now sick, more resources are spent for treatment, emergency care departments (which are mandated by law to accept everybody) are overloaded, and federal and local governments (that is, taxpayers) and the insured (via cost of insurance) end up paying for emergency care at a much higher cost than prophylaxis would have cost.

As usual, the people that profit from this try to twist the system to maximize their gains. They do that by propaganda (as the parent proves), by promoting advantageous legislation, and, in good old corporate tradition, by buying the politicians. See how, during the health care legislation debates, many politicians - most of them Republicans, but a few Democrats as well - objected again and again because some provisions under discussion would cut into the profits of insurance companies. See how they torpedoed single payer because government insurance could use the huge number of subscribers to negociate really good deals from health providers, and private insurers won't be able to compete - if you think for a moment, they really argued the insured shouldn't be given the means to negociate good prices because insurance companies would lose money. NOT ONE of them ever said better health for the population trumps profits. NOT ONE of them realized that their duty is to create legislation to improve people's health, and that insurance companies are not a goal, but just a tool - and maybe not a necessary one at all.

Re:Pipe dream

[dave420]

Everyone does use healthcare, even if they've never been in a hospital before. Every single person they interact with on a daily basis is there probably due to it, and without healthcare the number of people not working would be much, much higher. Just like schools, it's a common myth that people who have never been in them don't benefit from their existence and tax-based funding.

Re:Pipe dream

[dave420]

And the death penalty. USA! USA! USA!

Re:Pipe dream

[dave420]

Nonsense. Just look at the statistics - healthcare in the rest of the world is just as good, and even adjusted, costs far, far less. That's an accurate metric.

Re:Pipe dream

[currently_awake]

in the U.S. you've got insurance bureaucrats making the call. From the horror stories I hear that's not better.

Re:Pipe dream

[DigiShaman]

Members of Congress have and never will eat their own dog food anyways. So it's far worse than you think.

Re:Pipe dream

[cavreader]

The US provides health care related services using Medicare for the older people and Medicaid care for the poor. You can walk into any ER and receive medical services without any insurance. If you are in a car accident the hospital will work on you regardless of insurance or credit ratings. I have worked on apps for medicaid, medicare, and hospital billing applications and they all write off huge sums of money for unpaid health services. Even the 3rd party collection agencies who go after unpaid bills for profit write off huge amounts of money when thier collection attempts do not work. Many of them also hesitate to provide information that might effect a persons credit rating. There are also an significant number of organizations who operate free clinics for those in need. The system is not perfect but it is also not as bad as people think.

Re:Pipe dream

[arose]

In the US you are either rich, don't have health care resources to speak of... or is determined by bureaucrats without oversight.

Re:Pipe dream

[ScrewMaster]

False. The only thing you need to do is COMPARE your private sector option with a public one. There is no absolute, only relative comparison between the two.

From what I heard, seems like your private sector has proven, time and time again to be far more cruel, far more (self)destructive and far more egoistical then public one.

True, as it happens. And "what you heard" is irrelevant: it's apparent that you don't understand what is really going on here. And, as I pointed out, America has turned into a corporatist nightmare, so you the dichotomy between the public and private sectors is no longer so clear-cut.

Re:Pipe dream

[ScrewMaster]

Nonsense. Just look at the statistics - healthcare in the rest of the world is just as good, and even adjusted, costs far, far less. That's an accurate metric.

I've heard that before. And if you'd stop jerking your knee and read my post, you'd understand that my complaint is not with the idea of socialized medicine, but with the implementation. For the most part, our Federal Government has failed miserably at delivering anything resembling cost-effective, comprehensive medical care. And don't even bother to bring up Medicare: it's rife with fraud and isn't remotely comprehensive ... I had to go down that road with my father once his private insurer (Aetna, as it happens) jacked up his premiums to over twenty grand a year. Fortunately he suffered total renal failure, which is one of the few conditions that will automatically get you Medicare regardless of age since he was only fifty-nine at the time. They would cover treatment and medication that was directly related to his kidney issue and dialysis (for which I was grateful) but that was it, and I went way into the red covering everything else out of my pocket.

Point is, I for one do not trust my government (any of my various governments) to be able to competently manage anything as complex as national health care with out bungling it, or becoming completely subservient to the private sector. Either way, the American people get screwed.

Re:Pipe dream

[ScrewMaster]

Members of Congress have and never will eat their own dog food anyways. So it's far worse than you think.

No, I have a pretty good idea just how bad it is: I agree with you. Congress has their own private healthcare system: they don't care what happens to us because, like most of the laws they make, they don't have to suffer the consequences of their malfeasance.

Re:Pipe dream

[gtall]

Your basic premise is false, i.e., that the health care industry will maximalize health care. All industries attempt to maximalize profits. Now why should maximalizing profits maximalize health care. If anything, the industry will attempt to deliver the least health care at the most expensive price they can get away with.

Your next argument will probably be something along the lines of we don't want government rationing health care. The free market rations everything according to people's ability to pay. Health care is being rationed right now by the free market. The insurance companies work on actuarial data, that means they are deciding what to pay for and how much. That is, if you are lucky enough to have health care.

Re:Pipe dream

[Gr33nJ3ll0]

With a gallbladder problem you only WISH you could die, you never actually do so. Hence the waiting list. And yes I had a number of attacks before I had mine removed last year.

Re:Pipe dream

[celle]

"So long as you let government control it, yes."

And the current system is working so well. And the need for reform is BS, right. Tell that to the quarter of our population that has less health protection than needed and eighth of our population who has no health support at all.

" Only so long as you let government keep competition out of the market (e.g. by requiring vastly complex drug tests and keeping the supply of doctors artificially low)."

The AMA is keeping the doctors numbers low and is not the government. And the government isn't keeping competition out of the market, big corporations are.

Re:Pipe dream

[Thing 1]

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...

Affordable health care is as close as your fingertips. (That's not the only way to do it, either; there are many energy healing modalities. Sure, a broken limb requires a split; however, most maladies you can cure yourself. We'd been doing just that for thousands of years, before the pill-pushers took over.)

Re:Pipe dream

[celle]

"GM fucked itself over because they signed UAW
contracts."

GM made plenty of mistakes over the last several decades. Like the Wisconsin labor fight last year, the labor contracts were just an excuse, but not the cause of financial problems.

"They should have fired the entire represented workforce and hired off the streets a decade ago."

Right, in the condition GM was in it definitely could afford the cost of firing it's entire workforce and drop it's pensioners(it would've found a way) nevermind the cost of hiring and training new workers and loss of profitability for years that it would have caused. Do you actually think after firing a good chunk of the Detroit and trashing peoples benefits that GM would still exist the next day? They better have plenty of troops because they'll need'em when the riots start. I still remember the last labor fight they had, it wasn't pretty but was better than the end result of what you wanted would be.

Re:Pipe dream

[celle]

"GM fucked itself over because they signed UAW
contracts."

GM made plenty of mistakes over the last several decades. Like the Wisconsin labor fight last year, the labor contracts were just an excuse, but not the cause of financial problems.

"They should have fired the entire represented workforce and hired off the streets a decade ago."

Right, in the condition GM was in it definitely could afford the cost of firing it's entire workforce and drop it's pensioners(it would've found a way) nevermind the cost of hiring and training new workers and loss of profitability for years that it would have caused. Do you actually think after firing a good chunk of the Detroit and trashing peoples benefits that GM would still exist the next day? They better have plenty of troops because they'll need'em when the riots start. I still remember the last labor fight they had, it wasn't pretty but was better than the end result of what you wanted would be.

It's should be its.

Re:Pipe dream

[ILongForDarkness]

Number 7 in executions and #1 in percentage of population in prision. USA #1. Might be #1 for foreign nationals that are in prison without charges or legal process but that is okay as long as they are brown right?

Re:Pipe dream

[ILongForDarkness]

Not to mention that in the US the more money/better job you are the better chance you are to be able to just walk in and get treated right away. In socialized healthcare everyone waits equally and the care is provided based on medical need. That is what scares the bejesus out of some, mostly republicans, it would be something that money couldn't make better for you.

Re:Pipe dream

[c6gunner]

Affordable health care is as close as your fingertips. (That's not the only way to do it, either; there are many energy healing modalities.

lol. Right. Also free energy and a total understanding of the universe are right at your fingertips, too!

Re:Pipe dream

[c6gunner]

Clever.

"Healthcare in the US costs more because it's privatized. How do I know? Because privatization is the best way to maximize profits. How do I know that? Because healthcare in the US costs more."

"Anyone disagreeing with my POV is just repeating talking points that are part of "Their" propaganda. How do I know? Because "They" try to twist the system to maximize gains through propaganda. How do I know that? Because anyone who disagrees with me is just repeating "Their" propaganda ..."

I'm gonna have to remember that style of logic for future discussions ....

Re:Pipe dream

[Thing 1]

Keep laughing; at least that also has beneficial health effects. I know Jin Shin Jyutsu works for me, as does EFT; and I'm currently learning about Edgar Cayce's works. I'm no tyrant; I fear your bullet much more than I fear your laughter. In fact, I welcome your laughter, because it helps you.

It took me around 40 hours of practice before I could feel the energy moving. For me, it's electric; for others, it's hot/cold, or resistance/attraction. It's neat that the "sixth sense" uses an existing sense to make itself known.

Doesn't bother me one whit if you don't educate yourself about this. At least you're laughing.

Re:Pipe dream

[c6gunner]

lol. You bet your ass I'm laughing :)

Don't worry, sooner or later we'll get to the point where our educational system will be good enough to make people like you extremely rare, and our understanding of human psychology will become good enough to cure the rest. It probably won't happen in my lifetime, but, eventually, we will be able to fix you. Until then, we may as well enjoy the lulz!

Re:Pipe dream

[Thing 1]

Enjoy yourself!

Re:Pipe dream

[c6gunner]

Thanks :) You too!

Already some huge sunk costs

[squidflakes]

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...

Re:Already some huge sunk costs

[timthorn]

Nothing - Centricity isn't part of the JV.

Re:Already some huge sunk costs

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you may be a bit out of date. Most of the PACS (GE's included) systems out there have been migrated off of big UNIX and onto Windows and Linux backends. Most PACS systems today have the ability to integrate well into a modern IT infrastructure, including features like the ability to use LDAP for user authentication and authorization. At RSNA (the largest medical imaging tradeshow in the world) two weeks ago, it looked like the primary push of most vendors was to make the viewing solutions truly platform agnostic, with the ability to leverage latest and greatest standards, including HTML5 to deliver images using "zero-footprint" platform. A lot of them are leveraging these types of improvements to advertise cloud solutions for hospitals (a whole other can of worms I won't bother opening).

Re:Already some huge sunk costs

[Anonymous Coward]

Most PACS systems today have the ability to integrate well into a modern IT infrastructure, including features like the ability to use LDAP for user authentication and authorization.

You must not use the product. We just got Centricity, which we call 'epic fail'. If you know the PACS market you might get the irony.

Most PACS do not integrate well and GE's is among the worst. I work through three hospital sites in three states, so it's not one groups' version of an implementation. Why do I now have 20 clicks to get to a patient MR scan, then need 10 clicks to get to notes, then another log in to LIMS (wait, wait, wait) to check a lab test, and oh, I need to make another note, log back to the RIS so I can get to the PACS. What used to take 30 seconds now takes 3-4 minutes.

And I can't delegate anymore. *I* need to type in the notes, all the lab orders, radiology orders. Can't have a PA or nurse help.

I was at the RSNA last week, too. You've got GE telling people that all the problems are fixed (then why is my magnet quenching), Siemens saying they are winning every bid, Philips doing things different I guess because they are Dutch. The best booth was Samsung in the South Hall who had those nice foot massage stations.

There. That was the winning take-away from RSNA. Nice foot massagers.

 

Re:Already some huge sunk costs

[squidflakes]

I wonder if they are going to try and go after the same market share or do something on a lower price point. Any time I see GE Medical, I automatically think Centricity, even though the core of that business is the modalities.

Re:Already some huge sunk costs

[squidflakes]

Admittedly, I haven't worked on a Centricity system in a number of years. I'm glad they've gotten around some of the bigger headaches. When we brought up things like DHCP and LDAP to the R&D folks and the division heads, they looked at us as if we were speaking a different language.

I remember hearing from a Mike "What is the advantage of having an IP address assigned without you knowing what it is? How are you going to refer to the device without know it's IP?"

Re:Already some huge sunk costs

[sproketboy]

We've implemented many integrations with various PACS with HL7 and DICOM. Centricity seems to have a DICOM conformance statement so you should be able to pull images etc via DICOM,

http://www.gemed.com.ar/usen/interoperability/dicom/products/rpacsris_dicom.html

Re:Already some huge sunk costs

[VoidEngineer]

Actually, the employment market for PACS engineers is bottoming out, since HITECH and PPACA.

Long story short, it used to be a specialized niche industry, and now everybody is swarming into the market because it's perceived to be where the money is. If a hospital is willing to pay top money for somebody with 5 to 10 years of experience, then yes, there are a couple engineers out there who stand to make some good money. But why hire somebody with 10 years of experience, when there are plenty of new kids on the block with 2 years experience that they can hire at half the price? Also, in the healthcare field, it's not so much about how much you know about the tech. What's more important, in the eyes of the hospitals, is call rotation, and whether somebody is green and naive enough to sign up to 24/7 call support for two weeks per month.

I was making good money as a PACS Administrator (albeit with long hours) before health care reform. Since then, I've had to move to the vendor side as a Software Architect, since the market is now swamped with entry level PACS engineers.

Re:Already some huge sunk costs

[VoidEngineer]

Mod parent up Informative and Insightful. Particularly the newer PACS systems like Amicas and Merge. They all play nicely with DHCP and LDAP nowdays.

Re:Already some huge sunk costs

[VoidEngineer]

Probably has a lot more to do with your implementation and how your hospital culture values it's tech support staff than the Centricity product itself. Most PACS systems can integrate just fine if you put the time and effort and resources into doing so (meaning paying the salary necessary to have a properly staffed support team; meaning spending $500K per year in on-site support costs for a 150,000 patient/yr hospital or clinic system). Not going to argue about click count, because that's simply lousy software design. But your attitude about delegating speaks volumes about why the implementation is considered a failure at your location.

Re:Already some huge sunk costs

[VoidEngineer]

Having been an Oracle Database Admin in the healthcare sector, I'm not encouraged by the database implementations either. The bottom line is that company after company gets started developing a EMR/EHR related product, and seems to think that it's a good idea to start data-modeling within the database layer. Everybody else is smoking crack, so apparently they should too.

I'm a little more lenient about the tendency to reboot to fix problems, because it's actually pretty good ergonomics and workflow. Particularly in a high-stress, mission-critical environment. When someone is crashing (ie. having a heart attack), the quick-fix to get a workstation back on line needs to be as simple as rebooting. But if you're going to follow that path, the logging has to be spot-on so that analysts can go back after-the-fact.

exciting?

[TheGratefulNet]

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.

Re:exciting?

[c6gunner]

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.

I dunno, I'm pretty excited about living a longer, healthier life.

Really, if you don't find new healthcare tech exciting from both a technical perspective, and from a "cool, less death and disease!" perspective, you're not much of a geek. And if you insist on going around complaining that other peoples interests are boring, you're not a particularly pleasant human being, either.

Supreme Court poised to legalize medical patents

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

"Combining Microsoft's open, interoperable"...

[DrInequality]

Wow - either Ballmer is an A-grade ignoramus or (more likely) an A-grade liar!

Re:"Combining Microsoft's open, interoperable"...

[UnknowingFool]

No it's perfectly reasonable in Ballmer's mind where multi-platform for him means different versions of Windows for x86, Windows for ARM, and Xbox.

Re:"Combining Microsoft's open, interoperable"...

[Ramin_HAL9001]

Wow - either Ballmer is an A-grade ignoramus or (more likely) an A-grade liar!

Ballmer is so full of shit, his density is comparable to that of a pulsar. Since when has Microsoft EVER had any (truly) open software of any kind?

Watching Apple?

[kervin]

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.

Re:Watching Apple?

[QuietLagoon]

This is one product I really hope Microsoft succeeds in.

To what end?

To suck the profits out of the industry, like Microsoft did with the PC industry?

To stifle innovation in the industry, like Microsoft did with the PC industry?

To globally reduce quality expectations, like Microsoft did with the PC industry?

.

What, exactly, do you hope Microsoft succeeds in within the healthcare industry?

Okay Ballmer, enough with the jokes!

[s.petry]

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.

Re:Okay Ballmer, enough with the jokes!

[Uncle_Meataxe]

Actually, Steve Ballmer is not mentioned in TFA. The quote is attributed to "Nate McLemore, general manager of the Microsoft Health Solutions Group."

But, the irony stands...

Fun Fact: GE has been thier partner before....

[westyvw]

Against software patents, against open source, and against competition.

Re:Fun Fact: GE has been thier partner before....

[Haxagon]

That first one doesn't sound too bad.

Re:Fun Fact: GE has been thier partner before....

[westyvw]

LOL I had that backwards. I meant FOR software patents. Doh!

Maybe we 'Merkins need to live healthier lives...

[GreyWolf3000]

... 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.

MICROSOFT + GE?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Add General Motors to the mix!

Then you've united the Three Dinosaurs of the Apocalypse.

I had thought that GE was a good company...

[QuietLagoon]

... why in the world would they want to partner with Microsoft?

GE

[florescent_beige]

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.

The EMR Mess

[Guppy]

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

Re:The EMR Mess

[modmans2ndcoming]

Uhhh.... Meaningful use is a government regulation all healthcare providers have to meet by 2016 or face huge cuts in their medicare reimbursement. It standardizes a lot of things around features.

Cerner and EPIC systems already meet meaningful use and are very user friendly if your IT department knows how to build for the end user. Centricity is a lost cause and needs to die

Re:The EMR Mess

[VoidEngineer]

Having supported said systems, I'd say that Cerner and EPIC are lost causes as well. Too much attempted data-modeling in the database layers are causing their database schemas to melt-down and implode. As companies, they're likely to survive through mergers and acquisitions; but their current product lines should be put out to pasture as soon as possible.

Re:The EMR Mess

[modmans2ndcoming]

Epic can't add employees fast enough. They are turning clients away and are first in KLASS in most of their applications.

Clarity I'd a total mess but the production DB is based on cache and is fast and reliable. There is no reason they should stop what they are doing.

Re:The EMR Mess

[VoidEngineer]

Not being able to add employees fast enough isn't necessarily a sign of a good system.

The story goes that Milton Friedman was once taken to see a massive government project somewhere in Asia. Thousands of workers using shovels were building a canal. Friedman was puzzled. Why weren't there any excavators or any mechanized earth-moving equipment? A government official explained that using shovels created more jobs. Friedman's response: "Then why not use spoons instead of shovels?"

The point being that adding laborers doesn't translate into a better product. In fact, not being able to add employees fast enough and turning away clients seems like a clear sign of scaling problems, training problems, and user interface problems. And just because they're first in the KLAS rankings doesn't mean that they're any good at improving patient health.

Now that's not to say that they fill their role as hospital practice management systems. But the fact of the matter is that hospitals are big money, and attract their own types of politics and special interests. And these KLAS rankings are about just that: politics, special interests, funding, sales, and so forth. Hospitals need practice management systems, and they need a way to evaluate different systems, and Cerner and Epic have put the most work into being on the top of the pile right now. But their systems are horribly designed.

And don't get me started on Cache. It's only redeeming quality is that it's not a relational database. But seriously? MUMPS? You're saying that we should continue deploying health care systems based off MUMPS? I'm sorry, but we've learned a few things in the past 40 years since M/MUMPS was originally created. Now then, I'll concede that object and document oriented databases are the way to go with regards to databases in healthcare. And in that regard, systems based off of Cache at least have that going right for them, and is why they've got the market share. But mark my words: a vendor is going to come along with a modern HTML5 product based off of a next-generation database, and it's going to be transformative. I don't know what that database will be... Cassandra, Hadoop, BigTable, Redis, or what. But when it finally happens, it's going to be the Facebook and Google of healthcare.

Re:The EMR Mess

[modmans2ndcoming]

Not arguing that cache isn't old and MUMPS isn't archaic crap from people.who appear to not understand language development, but the UI of EPIC is as good and simple.as the people who build it for the hospital want it to be.

I don't know when you stopped supporting it but it has become much much much better since the Modle .system was implimented in 2006.

Re:The EMR Mess

[VoidEngineer]

It's been about that long since I've worked with EPIC; more recently with Cerner. Nonetheless, I think we have substantially different expectations of what an EMR can and should be. Note that, by your own words, you admit that the UI of EPIC is as good and simple as the people who build it for the hospital want it to be. Not the people who work at the hospital want it to be. It seems to me that the EPIC UI is as good as the people who work at the hospitals will tolerate. The people at the hospital would prefer to have some Star Trek type EMR with tricorders and automated diagnostics. EPIC and Cerner are not that.

I have yet to see a modern EMR come bundled with an anatomical Atlas of the human body, which coregisters a patients scans, blood work, and medical history with a virtual avatar. Until we get to that point, all EMRs and PHRs are lacking and have shoddy interfaces. Google was half way there with Google Body, but they've since scrapped their Google Health product. That's a long story unto itself, involving having their XML expert design the health product, and not understanding their target market needs. But they recognized the need for the atlas to coregister data to, and that it will eventually be a primary interface to EMR and PHRs.

Re:The EMR Mess

[modmans2ndcoming]

If you run the project correctly and to EPIC's methodology, then the builders (hospital Employees typically) will be validating with the users....but even user validation isn't good enough because the default answer from so many people in a user community is "make it a drop down (they mean category list of course) with 50,000 choices so we capture every possible thing we can think of".

At any rate...EMRs and PHRs are no where near the capabilities you mentioned because we are just starting to crawl out of the dark ages of the little start ups manned by retards who want to sell their crap ware to a hospital for 250K plus "support" and all it comes equipped with is an HL7 parser that they built over a weekend and is so inflexible, they have to rebuild it to make a modification to the message handling...causing you to regression test your Interfaces.

We are just now getting integrated solutions that handles the transition of care from the physician office to the ER through he many permutations of In patient care and out patient services. The current focus is on inter hospital communication of patient data and access to a PHR when ever a patient wants it with out having to request some HIM drone to pull part of their chart...then run to radiology for the radiology portion of their chart....etc.

Once we get all that working, then I think companies will be able to properly focus on the star trek aspects....but I do not necessarily see the value in your avatar idea for better patient care...it sounds more flashy wow factor than anything,

Re:The EMR Mess

[VoidEngineer]

Now this I can agree with. User validation doesn't cut it. It's going to take a company with Apple like design skills and resources to show people what's possible. To say 'this is what you've always wanted, but just didn't know how to build'. That company hasn't come along yet. But when they do, they'll offer solutions to problems that people didn't know they had. And by that, I mean addressing things like how to visualize and interact with ontologies of 50,000+ choices in an intuitive manner. (My guess is mapping and cartography technologies, applied to human atlas/avatar; bundled with search and filtering technologies). People think that their problems are with 'user interfaces' and 'electronic medical records'; when, in hind sight, we'll say that the problems were with ontology mappings, taxonomy searches, medical renderings, longitudinal displays, and the like.

And you're totally right about the small frys on the other end of the spectrum. They're causing half the headaches, no doubt.

At bell labs

[WindBourne]

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.

What about all the other Medical Imaging Companie?

[RIC_Splinter]

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.

GE's Products can only get better

[modmans2ndcoming]

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.

Re:What about all the other Medical Imaging Compan

[modmans2ndcoming]

GE does more than imaging... they are in EMR as well and those products blow.

Death by medical device BSOD

[mrflash818]

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."

Probably a lot more interested in Centricity

[sgent]

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.

Re:Probably a lot more interested in Centricity

[VoidEngineer]

50K to 100K works out to be about one support personnel per physician. That sounds about right; particularly if that physician wants somebody they can call 24/7 for support.

Another thing to keep in mind is that healthcare is practiced differently in different states, due to state laws. Not to mention different regional needs. For example, a clinic in the far north needs to offer more services related to frostbite and hyopthermia than a clinic in the south, and may price things differently as such. Therefore, their billing and clinical systems need to be set up differently.

Open?

[markdavis]

>"'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?

Re:Open?

[drainbramage]

Absolutely!
Combining M$ Open Systems with GE's political insider ability to pay no taxes we will finally drive health care prices down!
What could possibly go wrong?

Re:Maybe we 'Merkins need to live healthier lives.

[sowth]

Mod funny. People who live unhealthy and risky lives die faster, therefore cause less healthcare costs.

How did this get +4 insightful?

[jo_ham]

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.

Re:Entertaining

[sowth]

No shit. On a regular basis, I hear one of the techs at the dialysis complain about the computer losing information. They run Windows for the machines they enter all the notes and vitals.

VHA software = superb and open source

[Anonymous Coward]

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.