Today's New York Times has an article about Google and Microsoft and their planned move into the health care arena.
And no, they're not going to do this by paying for our doctor visits. Their approach is really all about empowering us to take more control over our own health. They'll do this with a combination of better search tools (like my own Diabetes Search Engine that's built with Google technology) and enabling us to maintain personal health records (PHR).
Now Electronic Health Records (EHR) or Medical records (EMR) are nothing new. There are several versions of these around provided by different companies. I believe the question will be whether Microsoft and Google can work together to develop a standard for PHRs. That would be a trick worth watching.
Right now the Google version has only been shown to a small number of people. The Google Blogoscoped site has shots of some of the screens from the Google system.
From the NYT article is sounds like Google is trying to do the 'right thing'
At Google, we feel patients should be in charge of their health information, and they should be able to grant their health care providers, family members, or whomever they choose, access to this information. Google Health was developed to meet this need.
I'm just wondering when they actually start working with real patients as they evolve this system.
This was a packed session that deserved to be in a much bigger room. Polita Paulus and Mahesh Prakriya covered the new dynamic data controls available in ASP.NET.
Essentially these controls make it much easier to add master-detail editing to a web site based on a database. Polita did a great presentation that showed using both C# and IronPython to extend the behavior of these dynamic controls.
Drop one of the controls on the page, and you get basic editing for almost no work. You can add a little code and the control will use UI widgets that you provide and can extend. And if you add a row to the database, it displays automatically when your rebuild and redeploy.
The demo included displaying pictures that are retrieved from the database, with no converter code required.
I've not done any ASP.NET programming in several years, but this stuff was impressive for the amount of UI you can create for almost no written code.
I just left the tail-end of the Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie keynote session at Mix07.
The session was jam-packed with folks standing at the back of the room (probably around 1,000 in attendance).
Ray was repurposing SaaS from Software as a Service to Software and a Service. It really sounds like they're embracing the approach that was first widely deployed with the iPod. Software running in the network cloud, and on the desktop (or in a browser), and on a mobile device. As Ozzie said, software 'embracing the value of the client'.
Most of the session was devoted to Silverlight and some new announcements around Silverlight design and development tools. Lots of cool demos from MLB.com, CBS, Netflix and others.
Lots of examples of rich content (especially live and streaming video) embedded in the web page. And they showed these running in IE7 and Firefox on Windows Vista and Firefox and Safari running on Mac. There also a nice demo showing a debugger running on Windows that was debugging a client session running on a Mac - that was impressive!
I also noticed an emphasis on the size of the download and the user experience in installing a Silverlight application. With broadband, it may seem that size no longer matters but remember there are still a large number of user environments (for example retail stores) that don't have a huge bandwidth connections to the client.
Scott Guthrie also pointed out several times how Silverlight is much faster for development and execution that JavaScript. He showed a simple chess program with a .NET chess player running against a JavaScript player. Silverlight 1.5 million move node calculation \versus JavaScript 500 node calculations for the same game. .NET wins. A little cheap but effective.
The Diabetes Technology Blog is focused on using technology to life better with diabetes. I review: blood glucose monitors; continuous glucose monitor; blood sugar meters; diabetes software and living with diabetes.
About Me
Name: Bernard Farrell
Location: Massachusetts, United States
I was born in Ireland and now live in the US.
I have had Type 1 diabetes for over 35 years. I struggle with my blood sugar, the same as most people with diabetes.
I wear a Cozmo 1800 insulin pump and a Dexcom SEVEN CGM to track my blood glucose levels. I also take Symlin to help control my post-meal blood sugars.
I'm blessed by God, and every day brings the possibility of a cure.
