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With 'Obamacare' Kicking In, Microsoft Sees a Health-Data Windfall
curtwoodward writes "Now that President Obama's federal health care reform is past its major political hurdles — and with renewed focus on out-of-control costs in healthcare — companies that sell 'big data' software are licking their chops. The reason: Healthcare has huge piles of information that is being used in new ways, to track patient admissions, spending, and much more. From hospitals to insurance companies, they'll all need new ways of crunching those numbers. It's basically an entirely new field that will dwarf the spending growth in traditional data-heavy industries like finance, retail and marketing, a Microsoft regional sales GM says."
Is the absolute worst fucking buzzword out there right now. It is a great way to figure out someone is a complete idiot right off the bat.
1) feel ill
2) go to doctor
3) get better
What does an insurance company have to do with it?
These things are being sold like hot cakes for this exact reason
Rail against the out-of-control government that gives us the TSA, the Patriot Act, and summarily executes US citizens.
Then cheer it on when it takes over 1/6 of the US economy?
And you claim to care about your rights and freedoms?
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT TO GIVE THAT OVERWEENING GOVERNMENT THAT MUCH *MORE* POWER?!?!?!
What big health care data? I'm not joking when I saw that the last place I would ever trust sensitive or critical information is a hospital. Hospitals have the least amount of data production and verification imaginable, I would be very skeptical about tracking data from any healthcare system because frankly it will always be incorrect.
Over the last 10 years I've had MANY MANY files that have gone missing, been lost, been misplaced and just plan gone from the health care system. In one case after losing the same MRI test three times they also lost the paper copies! Now I don't know a lot of industries that can lose the same work multiple times in both digital and non digital form.
Clearly I'm left with a very different out look on the health care system and data management and security, So as for collecting big data, that just wont work, that data isn't secure enough inside the system to account for anything. It would be like running a survey of 10,000 people where you only return 7,000 surveys, the data will never work because your missing to much important data.
Well, I for one welcome hospitals' advancements into COBOL. Such a huge improvement compared to current systems. Didn't know Microsoft had a COBOL division, though.
You'll lobby the government to update everything to metro and get a big nice juicy contract.
Usually, I find that those who complain about the use of scatological terminology are on the losing end of the argument in no uncertain terms, and are a suit weasel.
US system is FUBAR, 50million uninsured, huge numbers of medical induced bankruptcies (for the heinous crime of being unlucky), lower life expectancy.
Nationalised single payer with optional extra private coverage is demonstrably cheaper and has (on average) better outcomes. Anyone with half a brain would get behind establishing it in the US. Oh and while you are at it do something about malpractice tort reform - the major cause of excessive medical costs.
I'd like to pledge all of my future mod points to you mister...whoever you are.
Can there be real competition or is the data already in some MS format or behind MS servers?
Rail against the out-of-control government that gives us the TSA, the Patriot Act, and summarily executes US citizens.
Then cheer it on when it takes over 1/6 of the US economy?
And you claim to care about your rights and freedoms?
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT TO GIVE THAT OVERWEENING GOVERNMENT THAT MUCH *MORE* POWER?!?!?!
UK Economy: $2.4 trillion
UK Heath expenditure: under $200 billion.
That's 1/12th of the economy, sounds like you overspend on your health system. Shouldn't the competition keep prices down?
i work at a major medical research institution. A few years ago, our CIO showed us a graph of data they'd gone through showing a large spike in heart attacks in otherwise healthy men. The spike then dropped a few years later. Normally someone wouldn't be looking at this data, so it wasn't until after the spike was gone that this was investigated. Turned out that Vioxx had been put on the market about a year before the spike started, and was pulled off the market about 6 months or so before the spike dropped off.
Getting massive amounts of data (anonymized of course) can show trends in public health that can give us a lot of information and save lives and money.
(and yes, I hate the term 'big data'. No sense of scale of how big it is.)
Is the absolute worst fucking buzzword out there right now
The worst buzzword out there is, without a doubt, "Obamacare". This clusterfuck of an industry bailout bill has pretty well no resemblance to health care reform, or to any of what Obama actually wanted to do.
It is a great way to figure out someone is a complete idiot right off the bat.
br? That is also true about people who use the word "Obamacare".
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Nationalised single payer with optional extra private coverage is demonstrably cheaper and has (on average) better outcomes. Anyone with half a brain would get behind establishing it in the US
You are absolutely correct on that.
Unfortunately you have missed the fact that such a thing is officially labeled as "uncontrollable, completely nutbar, crazy-ass Stalin-esque Hitler-loving Castro-backing communist socialist fascism!". So while it makes sense to a sensible person, the dominant conservative narrative here tells people that it is a terrible, terrible idea that should never enter the discussion. Even our allegedly "liberal" president took the idea off the table about 12 seconds into the first discussion.
In other words, the US will never stand for single payer. This is an enormous travesty but it will always be that way; single payer won't come to the country currently known as the USA.
Oh and while you are at it do something about malpractice tort reform - the major cause of excessive medical costs.
You do know the most common profession for legislators before being elected, right? The most common profession is lawyer. Malpractice suits are a huge revenue stream for attorneys all over this country, there is no way they will attack it, that would be like United Defense telling the Department of Defense that they don't see a need for a new kind of missile, warhead, or transporter.
Hopefully at some point our country peacefully separates into two (or more) new countries so that the sensible and logical people can have single payer health care and the others can yell at each other about pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
This article makes it seem like there is a sudden market in hospital data management and reporting capabilities. This market has already existed for at least the 15 years, and Microsoft will have a hard time breaking in if thats what they want. Companies like Cerner, Sunquest, Meditech, Epic, McKesson, etc already have the market pretty much cornered on LIS/HIS data systems that provide all of the functionality these hospitals need...patient tracking, billing, result tracking, etc. The people who make the decisions about what systems to go with usually ask their friends and colleagues at other hospitals about what they are already using, because hospitals want to go with what they know works.
I work as a software engineer for a medical device integration/medical data management company, and I know first hand how tough it is to get a new product out on the market (even barring any FDA approval) because even if you have been providing solutions to a hospital for over a decade, they still want to know who else is using it to get their feedback on it.
The future's NOT in applications, but instead, data... BIG data of nearly ALL kinds!
* "The future, is now..."
APK
P.S.=> For ANY "doubting Thomas'" here as well?
Try *think* about 1 thing - how data is OFTEN used against you!
This is nothing new either, since a simple rumor can send the stockmarket "flying" in ANY direction "the powers that be" choose, simply by using the "right mouthpiece" saying he has the 'data' that backs him up!
You NEED HIM TO BE AN "EXPERT"? Hey, no problem - buy his way onto the NY Times "best seller" lists too -> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-how-you-buy-your-way-onto-the-new-york-times-bestsellers-list/
(See folks? It's ALL DATA TO BE MANIPULATED, or even CREATED artificially, & any way you like, to get the RESULT expected!)
It's also amazing how easily statistics are "bent" in samplesets to do it, especially ones you PAID for in paid studies & "4/5 dentists chew trident" when they're on your HMO's payroll & you SENT them crates of the stuff to chew too!
(So watch yourselves on that account too, as far as 'data' goes - after all, it's how the 'great depression' was initiated by bankers via using JP Morgan the financier's words to do it, & recently done as an experiment, yet again on APPLE stocks -> http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/doug-kass-shows-how-easy-it-manipulate-shares-apple ))...
... apk
In recent years we had SOA, SOA is dead, Cloud, SOA in the Cloud. A lot of software architecture topics. Good for funding software engineering faculties. However, the database people had not that much new things to sell. Ok there is no-SQL DBs and graph-databases, but to really sell them, you need a new buzzword. And big data is superb. All the problems which where solved for small and normal data, can now reselled for big data.
Actually the is something new, it is the complexity of the data storage and its increased distribution. However, we can use all that data mining stuff from recent years and just have to scale them.
Rail against the out-of-control government that gives us the TSA, the Patriot Act, and summarily executes US citizens.
Then cheer it on when it takes over 1/6 of the US economy?
And you claim to care about your rights and freedoms?
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT TO GIVE THAT OVERWEENING GOVERNMENT THAT MUCH *MORE* POWER?!?!?!
UK Economy: $2.4 trillion
UK Heath expenditure: under $200 billion.
That's 1/12th of the economy, sounds like you overspend on your health system. Shouldn't the competition keep prices down?
First, US government involvement has historically lead to anything but keeping prices down.
Second, since most US health care is through private insurance and through private transactions, the US population basically spends that much on health care for the simple reason they want to.
Third, Obamacare is fundamentally dysfunctional. It's two main goals of greater health care coverage and lower cost are diametrically opposed. It's pretty damn impossible to increase demand without increasing cost. Of course, giving everyone "coverage" and then rationing health care would do that. Hmmm, would the same cynical demagogue who railed against the Patriot Act as a candidate but then went well beyond anything in that Act to actually conduct "extrajudicial killing" of US citizens once elected to President, hmmm, would a person who could do THAT really care what the actual results would be as long as he could claim some great accomplishment that would make his useful idiot constituency happy?
Hospitals aren't buying into software because of "Obamacare" (or the Affordable Care Act, if brevity isn't your thing). Hospitals are buying into software because of the HITECH act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). They're getting more Medicare reimbursement for showing meaningful use of their software, so that's the trigger, not the ACA.
If you want "big data" you think IBM, you don't think Microsoft.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'm sorry, but from the point of "4 vs 5 makes something Constitutional as opposed to unconstitutional?" you lose all credibility.
You can dislike the holding all you like, and there are a number of legal arguments that can be made about it, but when your route of attack is a whine about how five people can decide what the constitution means you've just undermined all of your remaining points.
That is how the judiciary in this country has worked for a little more than 200 years (Marbury v. Madison was decided in 1803), to complain about it now, because of a holding you disagree with, is facile in the extreme.
Microsoft regional sales GM says that finance, retail and marketing dwarfs the yearly growth of finance, retail and marketing. They also have a piece of new software to address this challenge: while(1){}
And your post on the subject doesn't help matters. It just brings into clearer relief that you do not, in fact, know what you're talking about.
I built my companies 1st hadoop cluster in late 2009 & it was a total _O_ _M_ _G_ moment - I knew this was a transformative technology like the spreadsheet & rdbms before it. I've tried in vain for years to make the lightbulb go off in various executives heads but 3 1/2 years later they're wanting to kill our modest 20-ish node cluster (since it's not "in the cloud" {rolls eyes}) & replace it with terradata or netezza (yes, you read that correctly).
ahha good share thanks..
They have increased job security to a point, but with the cap on non-service spending they can't make the bucket loads of cash they had been making. And Obamacare does have provisions where they pay for quality rather than quantity. Which should deal with that. What's more, with the insurance exchanges it's a lot harder for insurance companies that aren't providing quality services to keep people using their insurance.
So, collectively it may have increased their job security, but if an insurer is doing as poorly as many of them are now, in the future, the market can actually deal with that to an extent by having a mass exodus of people whose needs are being served going elsewhere.
Bullshit.
They only appear diametrically opposed if you're a moron. The reality is that people will be forced to pay into the system if they have the money rather than waiting until they get sick to get insurance so they'll at least be contributing something rather than being overwhelmed by bills and declaring bankruptcy. What's more, we're already starting to see checks mailed out to people whose health insurer charged too much for premiums. My insurer was pretty good at estimating the real costs so my check was pretty small. But for other people the checks were a lot larger.
Obamacare also mandates that insurance companies pay for preventative care, you know the care that prevents serious and expensive conditions from occurring or at least reduces the likelihood of such conditions occurring. The US pays a crap load of money for preventable diseases to people who haven't been able to afford coverage and have to wait until they have a serious illness before seeking help or worry about whether or not their trip to the hospital for a possible heart attack is going to be covered.
As far as the historical, that's not the government that's because morons like you vote for corporatists with no interest in keeping costs down if it means corporate interests and the rich suffer. Every other country that's gone with universal healthcare has lower costs than we do, if we screw that up, you can blame the GOP for corporate welfare.
Be interesting to see a HIPAA violation prosecuted against MS due to their lack of security.
And think about what a day long service failure would be like...
Windows would then be killing many people not getting the appropriate care.
Maybe it needs to change, then. Just because 'that is how we have always done it' doesn't make it right. Not recognizing that makes you lose all your credibility.
Well, I hear they don't have a Supreme Court in Somalia. Maybe you should move?
Also, you're an idiot.
How do the insurance companies get premiums from dead people?
[expletive deleted]
Do you believe that you can win a debate against the President (a former professor of Constitutional law) on Constitutional law? Also, do you know how hard it is to amend the US Constitution?
Well the important thing with Obamacare is that it's actually creating real value where it didn't exist before. It's not like all those other government programs where they just added 5 more layers of bean counters and then pronounced it a success.
Oh wait ...
It's all about that socialist utopia that the Slashdotters seemed to, until recently, love so much...
(opens coat)
Sent from my ENIAC
in the 80s and 90s. Here we are in the 2010s and I see doctors that diagnose with computers and closet making companies that replaced carpenters with a CNC machine and a tape measure.
Big Data might be a buzz word, but it's real. Computers have been fast enough to crunch large amounts of data for a while now, but you needed either a lot of money or a brilliant programmer for both to do it. Cheap Linux clusters and Hadoop for free changes all that. Code monkeys have enough power at their disposal to do number crunching that woulda taken a genius 20 years ago.
What's the result? Huge increases in efficiency and expert systems that make 90% of Knowledge Workers obsolete. We see it with Wal-Mart where the shelves with next to no overstock. We see it with UPS eliminating left turns to save gas.
We're gonna start seeing it with Credit Card fraud going away pretty soon here too. The second you run an out of patter charge you're card gets flagged and you get a text message. It's not just that computer power is so cheap the companies can scrutinize every transaction, it's that it's gotten so cheap that the cost of doing that extra work is now lower than the cost of letting the fraud happen.
So yeah, Big Data might be a buzz word, but it's a real one. I'm not so sure it's a good thing either. The huge increases in efficiency are really starting to squeeze the lower half of our population at a time when everyone's talking about spending cuts and Austerity and Keynesian economics is a dirty word. We're piling on the money at the top and none of it is trickling down. Nobody is spending any money, and we're just sorta shutting down the whole world. We had 2000 years of dark ages where people basically did nothing, so if it's one thing history has shown it doesn't take much to halt all human progress...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You might want to study the economics of this a little further. Forcing people to pay into the system does not bring costs down, it brings revenues up. I live in such a system where everyone who can afford to is forced to pay. More than half the government's budget is now on health care and for some odd reason, all that money gets soaked up by an ever expanding layer of management. Services have deteriorated to the point where it's often cheaper to just pay for a patient to go get care int he US. The few people doing *real* work in the system (doctors/nurses) are overworked, underpaid and most attempts to strike are rendered illegal.
They set our system up stupidly hoping that the costs would remain the same or lower. However, anytime you offer a mountain of money to a system, no matter how well intentioned it is, it always ends up getting consumed with very little return on investment. This is because there is absolutely no downward pressure on prices: It is the government's money, they will do what it takes to pay. Which usually amounts to forcing that money out of the population, one way or another. Not to mention that we punish efficiency: Any budget that under-spends gets cut the next year.
Corporations are evil, I'm not going to defend them, but remember that if it weren't for the government handing your money to them, they'd actually have to earn it or go broke. The government can take just your property by force of law and toss you in jail if you attempt to refuse. The government also remembers who its friends are and your name isn't on that list. Every increase in power that you allow your government to take will serve those friends, make no mistake about that.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Obamacare also mandates that insurance companies pay for preventative care, you know the care that prevents serious and expensive conditions from occurring or at least reduces the likelihood of such conditions occurring.
I wonder how much of that preventative care actually is. Medicine is a field notorious for being very difficult to figure out costs and benefits of actions and their consequences.
If preventative care really had that solid benefit to it, then why aren't most insurers funding it already? They aren't dumb. My take is that preventative care is great for finding expensive problems (a major turnoff for insurers) and not so great at actually helping us live longer or cheaper.
reI usually employ the standard of whether somebody is capable of making a point without resorting to profanity.
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I agree with you whole-heartedly. There may be occasions to use profanity or outbursts of shouting, but those occasions seem to be those which require being intimidating or acting like a rabid dog in order to get the other side to back down. Profanity does not have a place in normal discussion, argument, or debate.
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As a bonus point, I think that "cloud computing" is the worst buzzword out there, though the synergy that comes about with "cloud computing of big data" may be more than the sum of its parts. [bingo! bingo!]
I call bullshit, due to new laws the company I work for changed us all to high deductible insurance. I now pay 250 a paycheck for healthcare and the insurance company does not have to pay a dime until I spend $3,000 out of pocket, so yes a small few get some help, but a large group who sacrificed a lot to ensure our families had something get pushed to the edges, I get a health savings account, but I have to save $3,000 before I can see a doctor with out it costing me more than that. As for paying for preventive care My daughter needed some hearing test early in the year, she went in one day before her birthday, and the insurance company agrees this falls under preventive care, but since it was not her birthday they did not have to cover, if I would have waited another few days it would have been covered, or hay what if they explained this clearly, as I do not have time to research all the loop holes, I work 50 - 60 hours a week with a wife who does the same. So what is this hearing test cost (to be fair they did it twice) $1,000. what did they find, nothing, they want to do an MRI, but my out of pocket will be $4,000. So I have to wait to save up $2,000 for the insurance to pay a dime, and once they do pay they are not paying the entire price, no now I hit my $5,000 expected out of pocket funding, so why do I have insurance?.. Oh ya I get fined by the Government If I don't.. The Government can mandate until they are blue in the face, but if its not profitable the insurance companies will get around it. also from CNBC http://www.cnbc.com/id/100376831/How_Obamacare_Is_Changing_Your_Health_Benefits COST SHIFTING Employers will continue a push this year toward account-based health plans, also known as consumer-driven health plans. These plans come with low premiums, but high deductibles—patients are typically asked to pay the first $3,000 to $5,000 of each year's medical expenses themselves. These plans often add a health-savings account where the employee save pre-tax dollars to pay for those expenses. Though often the employer will add money to the account as well as part of the employee's benefits, the point of these consumer-driven plans, as their name indicates, is to introduce market forces to our inefficient, price-bloated medical system. "It's a step toward giving people more control," says Paul Fronstin, head of health-benefits research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute. "They say, 'We'll give you this pot of money and give you some exposure to the health care market.'" read that last part with the first, over and over until 5th grade math kicks in. You have to spend $3000 before you get a dime, but you have to save the $3,000 first ($250 a month) plus the insurance premium you already pay, so you really get no health care until you save the money. So say you like me pay $250 every two weeks to cover a family of 5. that is $9,000 a year out of your pocket. So how will this bring down cost? You will pay it, have no real choice, you will still pay for insurance and now a new group, those who make money off setting up savings plans to meet government regulations is profiting, I see no incentive for the medical industry to lower cost, hell no they have your money already. And since my medical insurance only covers in network doctors, its not like I can shop around.. They all charge the rate negotiated with the insurance company.. WAKE the fuck up.. Obama and his plan is a insurance dream, it is corporate welfare..
Government can and does some really bad shit.
Government can and does some good shit.
I cheer for it when it does the good shit, and complain about it when it does bad shit. Sounds perfectly logical to me.
because it safeguards all and anyone from having access to my data who isn't directly involved in my care as a patient. Isn't that right? Beuhler? Beuhler? I mean good god, how much is it costing the U.S. healthcare system to run HIPAA?
Given that it's two words I'd be tempted to agree.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
i'm roman_mir i can't post under my name due to a liberal conspirasy mod'ing me down
i'm roman_mir i can't post under my name due to a liberal conspirasy mod'ing me down
No, it's due to your constant trolling and name calling.