I think this kind of shit gives me hope that the internet isn't just for porn and poker anymore. What a great and smart way to exponentially increase the resources of the project. Stuff like this, and folding@home, and other crowd-sourced projects are an amazing phenomenon. Whoever is in charge knows how to sell it too, with the whole "read it while you translate it" concept, which kind of turns the whole thing into a video game. Nice work by the Oxford folk.

Hmm this isn't really true now is it? For the record, NOBODY knew what the actual final standard for US healthcare would be until Sept 2010 (although the preliminary final ruling was July 2010, but still...). While ICD9 to 10 may have taken ten years, there was no reason to believe it was going to float to the top of the coding systems expected for use until it was written into the federal register last year. And its not like there's a ton of options or anything that could have replaced it, making early adoption risky and potentially pointless or anything.

What I think TFA is trying to express is NOT limited to ICD. That's a "low hanging fruit" which doesn't include the other coding enhancements required for EHR conformance. ICD is a way of expressing complains and maladies via a coded system so that everyone can understand it if it appears as a part of your public medical record. In other words, everyone has to say code xxxx1 = "breast cancer" so that when you show up in an ER 6 months after a diagnosis, they can tell what's going on. The elephant in the room isn't the malady descriptions, its the coding of procedural treatment (SNOMED-CT), laboratory procedures (LOINC), RX allocations (RXNORM and the NDF), and how its billed back to insurance (CPT), and more importantly how they interconnect.

We make EMR systems targeted towards radiology, and I can say with conviction that the whole CCHIT process has thrown GE and Siemens (and their ilk) into absolute chaos. They are, today, faced with fixing their old systems to be modern/conformant, and then trying to keep them updated going forward on a MUCH more aggressive maintenance schedule than they are used to. Oh, and every month that they can't do it, their customers will see as lost revenue from govt. reimbursements. Unenviable is an understatement, it will be a financial disaster for GE if they start losing people en masse to Epic and other new players.

As someone who makes "meaningful use" based systems, I can tell you its no joke to implement. CCHIT certification alone encompasses 25k pages of standards that have to be followed to the letter and proven via testing for qualification.

In a way, it's a strange twist that the big players (GE/Siemens/Merge) lobbied to make the qualifications as hard as they currently are in order to limit new competition, and are now sinking into the pit they themselves dug. Sick, but hilarious simultaneously.

Trolling, LOL.

Every computer made has more than a TB, including the new windows tablets (which we happen to have prototypes of, since we are a development shop). And I deal with big data every day (medical images, among other things). So just to recap, I'm sitting in front of a windows tablet with a 1.5TB drive in it right now.

Oh, and it has audio in, not to mention my mixer has wireless support (granted, most people would plug their tables into a sound card, but that's not the point here).

So, again, Apple is selling last year as new, except they get to control its use?

Again, how about no.

Ok yeah that's cool and all, but it already exists. Last night, I was watching Top Gear on a phone, then I went inside and picked right back up in the middle of the episode on a PS3 using Netflix. It's not really The Cloud(TM), but it might as well be and works just as well. And it's hardly a revolution worth crowing about. It's kind of neat but they ain't the first to get there. Not even hardly.

 

What I really want is Silverlight, which won't ever happen because of strictly political reasons between MS and Apple. It's stupid, these companies get into pissing matches with each other and their customers suffer from it.

I dunno bout you, but I have a record collection of about 5k vinyl records. If I wanted to synch that to an Ipad, I'd have to have ... a computer?

Seriously 64G, the most expensive one sold, just don't cut it, it's just not enough space.

That, and I have learned that when companies like this CAN change the rules at any time, they inevitably do... at will.

ALL my content is > TB on any given day. Now what?

yeah its screwed up isn't it?

Apple's approach to developers is

1) We get to claim 30% of your revenue
2) You have to live in a box and learn "our way" to stay there
3) We can change the rules at any time

It's almost dystopian, how the hell do they expect to attract developers with these kinds of restrictions?

It has never been more clear that Wonziak did all the work, and Jobs did the marketing, and we all know who ended up running the place.

Seriously, in the early 90's I wrote a lot of software on a 7200 PPC Apple, and loved it, but I just can't get into the new Macs. They feel like the government with all the rules.

I was hoping for some new iphone ... or flash support... or SOMETHING new. Icloud? SERIOUSLY?

I think it's painfully evident that programmers and marketing people think completely differently about tech at this point. To me, The Cloud (TM) was the SAN 10 years ago (storage area network), and it changes absolutely NOTHING. Except maybe now apple can cut you off from your own computer whenever they feel like it.

No thanks, come back when you guys learn to innovate again though and we'll try again, mmk?

I like the Metro style MS has going on here, but there seems to be a lot of concern in the .NET community that they are tossing the "traditional" developers overboard to chase HTML5 over Js. We have been working with WPF/XAML/C# for the last year, and it's not even entirely baked yet, so I just don't understand why they feel the need to start bolting new shit onto it. They SERIOUSLY need to fix VS2010 before doing anything radical like this, or who the hell is going to develop for this thing... and with what? Right now, XAML is non-debuggable, takes twice as much time as forms did to develop with, is SLOW, doesn't deploy well, is incomplete (even after you add all the codeplex add-ons and toolkits), and WPF and Silverlight are nowhere near as "interchangable" as MS marketing wants everyone to believe. And javascript/HTML? Apparently we should all throw out VS2010 and start working with Eclipse?

I guess Apple has them so scared that they are in danger of hopping on trends to try to catch up, and that's going to be a MAJOR PROBLEM if they screw all the .NET developers along the way.

I mean, look, touch is cool and all, and we have been able to make some really cool interfaces on early windows tablets, but I have to agree with Enderandrew above that turning the OS into a giant phone is a bad idea. Sheesh, one would think that MS, one of the largest software shops IN THE WORLD, could do both at the same time, but it appears not ....

Consequently... fingerprints are a huge problem for us (we make medical workstations where smudges can screw up diagnostic quality), so I wonder if anyone is out there working on a smudge-less touch interface? Maybe self-cleaning? Too much to hope for?...

I absolutely agree with you, these should be tested and regulated as medical devices. As your article link noted they should be calibrated, QC'd and logged daily, and by someone who knows how to do it (an unqualified check is actually worse than not doing anything, since the wrong setting can be a very bad thing). And you can bet with the number of them out there already a lot slipping through maintenance cracks. The deal is, you can't tell if one's bad, you just get a bunch of passengers with a rash a week after flying who all drop dead 6 months later...

I make radiology stations for a living. The 3 companies that make the "backscatter" x-ray machines aren't people like "GE' or "Siemens", they're defense contractors. There's many radiologiests who won't fly commercial because of these things. All it takes is ONE screw up in configuration and maintenance and you get Therac-25... except these things are everywhere now...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

I didn't expect it to be so accurate, but jesus it came out really cool. Playing Table Tennis on a 12 foot projected surface is surreal.

MS is probably being honest to say they left it open. It's an obvious PC interface, at least IMHO, and I'll bet it get released with the next iteration of the DirectX SDK. I can see a lot of dedicated environments for business where this makes complete sense as a mouse replacement. It's not a "wireless" anything, it's completely hands free, which sounds like a trivial difference but in reality changes the entire experience.

We make medical software, and right off the top of my head I could see a quick interface to let a doc work on you and use something like this to navigate medical histories (say, by voice with some limited hand waving for selection). Seriously, most folks are trying to do that kind of thing with tablets atm, but in an emergency room or surgery having your hands free is priceless (not to mention, no contamination from physical interfaces).

I agree with you really, note that before Google and Apple came Dell... who closed within 5 years or so after receiving a ton of tax breaks. That said, what makes rural areas a little different is that when there is a tech concentration, that's just about all there is so the economy for the local area really does get directly affected (instead of Atlanta, DC, New York, et al. who all have super-diverse industrial makeups... out here its farming or IT) . You are right though, subsidies seem to rarely pay for themselves.

It's been strange to see this happen. We live right in the center of all this (near Winston-Salem, apple is 45 minutes south, and google is 20 minutes west) and I have to say, these places are not subtle. These places are HUGE. I think the Elkin/Google installation is like 250 acres, which is silly huge. It makes sense, land out here is cheap but you are still 5 hours from DC which in itself is priceless for corporations (the big ones). Add in tax breaks, an evolving biotech industry (like us... we hope!), and lots of geeks near-local (the triangle with IBM/Glaxo/Redhat/Epic Games/Etc. is 2 hours east) and it seems obvious. The nice part for people who live here is that bandwidth is really really good in order to feed all these guys. REALLY good :)