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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.
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.)
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
As someone who often thinks logically, I must say that the constant crisis in Europe challenges the feasibility of Europe.
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.
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.