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Some Windows XP Users Can't Afford To Upgrade
colinneagle writes "During a recent trip to an eye doctor, I noticed that she was still using Windows XP. After I suggested that she might need to upgrade soon, she said she couldn't because she couldn't afford the $10,000 fee involved with the specialty medical software that has been upgraded for Windows 7. Software written for medical professionals is not like mass market software. They have a limited market and can't make back their money in volume because there isn't the volume for an eye doctor's database product like there is for Office or Quicken. With many expecting Microsoft's upcoming end-of-support for XP to cause a security nightmare of unsupported Windows devices in the wild, it seems a good time to ask how many users may fall into the category of wanting an upgrade, but being priced out by expensive but necessary third-party software. More importantly, can anything be done about it?"
That helps with hardware incompatibility but not security.
Yea, its not like medical software errors ever killed anybody. Eh Therac-25?
Sounds like someone has never had to use medical software. As much as the "zealots" would like to think, not everything is best run on OpenSource. It's not a troll, it's based on 15 years working with medical offices and doctors that don't have time to figure out how to get things to work. And yes, a lot of doctors offices don't have any support on staff or contract other than the EMR or EPM company they are dealing with.
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This is a really bad example to make your case. She has HIPAA data and needs to upgrade as her computer can't be patched anymore next year. No sympathy for someone with HIPAA data trying to get out of patching their system.
Now, if you had picked an example of someone who didn't have HIPAA data I'd point to options that could be done. However to be frank I am all out of sympathy for anyone in this situation. Microsoft announced end of life on this a very long time ago and frankly gave a lot longer on the EOL and support for the OS than Mac or any of the Linux variants.
This reminds me of the gas station owners put out of business by the new standards for underground tanks. They had years of advanced notice, yet they still refused to modernize something critical to their business that they knew they needed to. Time came that they could no longer be grandfathered in and all of a sudden a bunch of stations went out of business.
Why, because they didn't want to spend money for tanks that were resistant to leaks that could ruin the environment? A doctor that doesn't want to spend money to help prevent leaks (patient data) is no better than the gas station owner. It's a business expense just like any other and a business owner that refuses to give IT it's due as they should. Quit supporting IT neglect by helping people like this out.
A lot of "professional" users of computers (doctors, lawyers, bankers, etc) seem to think that they gotta have really special software to handle everything they do, because everything they do is so special. Much of this is due to people who think they're smart being duped by people who are smarter into thinking they need special software. Is the solution here that these professionals need to do a better job of buying their IT support in the first place? Admittedly, there is certainly some software that has to be written for very narrow and specialized needs, but a lot of these needs can be met by pretty much off-the-shelf solutions implemented by people who know what they're doing. I think these professionals start off by trying to do it themselves (because they are smart, you know?), find that it's not as easy as they thought, and then buy into the pitch that they need REALLY smart IT people doing specialized stuff for them. I'd laugh at all this, but it's part of why our health care costs so damn much.
Well I can certainly tell that you're not a physician, as a physician I can tell you that you have no idea how many limitations, restrictions, and compliance requirements exist in medical software. The issue isn't that you need these things, sure you could host your patient information on Google docs, but when someone breaks into that it can cost you 250K per patient that is lost, there isn't an upper limit on that either, I don't see that many doctors with that kind of cash willing to take those risks. I am not saying it is better to be running on unsupported systems, but it isn't like you can go download some mysql database and front-end designed to organize your DVD collection and safely store patient information. Also most doctors don't have the time or knowledge to do it well themselves so they are stuck with what is 1) out there, and 2) compliant.
That may be the case in some fields, but in most cases I haven't seen materials available online that compare to the texts that I use as a student in advanced mathematics.
When I've looked I've come across a complete lack of material for most topics beyond say third semester calculus and second semester differential equations that one can read to actually learn a subject. While there are certainly some example problems out there, a cohesive narration of how to go about solving more advanced problems especially with a consistent notation seems to be lacking. Sure there's resources like Pauls Online Math Notes, but that drops off before then. Wikipedia has some formulas and descriptions, but often doesn't have example problems. For many topics, you can find small pieces of information all over the web, but if you want to actually read up on a specific subject I haven't seen anything on the internet that rivals a good old fashioned text book.
Now, I don't see any reason for there to be new editions as often as there are. Many of the textbooks I read in my spare time are actually pretty old, but outside of some of the topics that rely on technology there isn't a whole lot of reason to have new editions. Even something such as numerical analysis (which should probably have a technology based theme for CAS) doesn't really need to be updated very often as the algorithms don't change, just the languages that may be used.
Perhaps I'm just biased, but a well written text book seems much more useful than gleaning bits of information from a variety of sources that all use different notations and symbols for learning about a topic in math.
Yea, not being able to afford an upgrade is not an excuse. That's like a truck driver saying he can't afford to buy new tires. At some point he's going to have to or he's not going to be driving his truck.
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