Google ♥ Microsoft?

The beauty of healthcare: it brings titanic enemies like Microsoft and Google together in a love-fest! Here’s an article from CNN.com (originally published on CNet) that describes how they both like the other’s approach  http://bit.ly/2YBnA . Still not clear what the level of uptake for each of their approaches is, but it’s certainly the right step.

As we mentioned in a previous post,  healthcare IT is where financial services IT was 20+ years ago. Few people would trust putting all their financial data online or accessing it electronically – commonplace now. Trust will need to be earned – and perhaps a hybrid model which allows patients to store certain data locally on their home PC’s and selectively share the relevant parts of it with those who “need to know” may in fact be the ideal/likely outcome.

Repost of WSJ: Cost Is the Impediment

So here’s a blog post from the Wall Street Journal from a few weeks ago:    http://bit.ly/RAD1h.

Basically the title says it all – “Docs, Hospitals Skip Electronic Records for the Same Reason” and in the text you will find the answer: cost. Our industry needs to take this lesson to heart: in the day and age of Software-as-as-Service, subscription agreements and little/no services requirements, pushing large scale implementations of EMR systems is going to be a tough call.