Category Archives: how-do-we-get-to-where-we-wanna-go

Microsoft’s influence in healthcare

Despite advances in the opensource healthcare movement, adoption of opensource ideas by the healthcare industry lags behind its adoption in other industries. While at the same time MS seems to be making bold efforts to seduce health IT manages and clinicians; particularly by:

– The recently released office 2003 that includes InfoPath, which is being touted as being able to create CDA compatible documents. (demo)
– Pushing its own devices like tablets and PocketPCs for healthcare.
– The third area is MS embedded telemetry devices, a recent slashdot story about GUI’s in medical devices remided me of the neonatal ventilator that runs windows at my hospital!

What are your thoughts on MS’s efforts, paticularly InfoPath? On a broader level, I am also curious as to how we envision opensource ideals making serious inroads in the medical industry? or is this just going to be a painfully slow process.