EMR (electronic medical record)

In 2004 president (at that time) Bush said that in 10 years we will have a universal EMR for each American. We are almost 60% done in terms of time, but only 10%-15% done in terms of implementation, and that is only large hospitals, the results are even lower for small doctors offices.

There are many problems associated with EMR and one of them is storage of the EMR record. Plain record of a healthy individual is only 2mb, barely anything when we can buy 2tb drives for $100, but if the person only becomes sick (complex sickness) the record grows to 40mb, add some pictures and the record becomes 300mb, decode the genome of the person and it is a whooping 3gb on a short side. So where I can see that a large organization can afford a data center with thousands of hard drives running, storing this data, I cant really imagine a doctors office running a server rack full of storage just for the health records.
I can imagine cloud storage, but then the bandwidth becomes the issue and the cost associated with the storage in the cloud, again a no win situation.

As with every governmental idea, there is an issue with standards. Today there are at least a few, including HL7, that allow systems to communicate with each other. Each organization uses the one that they like.

If we want to see a universal health record, it should be implemented by the govt, in a central location, with some backup locations, where doctors could log in and search for the particular patient and then download the necessary data. It would make security maintenance a lot easier as well.

Instead of spending millions of dollars on individual ideas, the govt should implement it themselves. I'm sick of waiting an hour before the doctor finds out what sickness I have and what is the history of my disease.... and it happens every time I go to the doctor.

Tablet Wars: A New Hope

Starring Apple Ipad and the rest of the world....

So its on... We got a very nice war between producers, trying to compete who will get a nicer, yet not as usefull tablet.

The idea isn't new. Its been tried before, it just didnt take off as expected. Tablets have a very limited usage, especially tablets like Apple, which are limited by their own operating system that is not compatible with anything else in the world.

It didnt take long before other producers jumped on a band wagon and shown their own tablets, including Dell. Where I dont like tablets at all, Dells idea got me thinking... I believe it is extremely cool solution to have either a netbook or a tablet. Tablet for fun, netbook for real work.

Out of all the choices that are coming to the market, this is the one I think that has a chance of actually taking off. Apple did take off, but thats due to the army of followers that would say Jesus lives if Steve Jobs would ask them to...

The only question is, how long will this hype about tablets stick around? Overall they are not as usefull as they are shown and they cost awful lot for a medium sized screen to play games on the go...

In my opinion, in 2 years the market will actually shrink from what it is now. What do you think?

MKT 595 Week 1 YouTube almost profitable.... Almost.....

A couple of days ago I saw info surface about YouTube, mainly that it is "close to becoming profitable". I think everybody knows now that YouTube was bought by Google a few years ago for over $1.5 billion. The problem with it is, that until now, Google has not found a recipe of how to make money off of it. Every year it costs close to 1 billion dollars just to operate the site, considering the resources that it must use in order to work properly (there are 2 billion hits a day).

Not long ago Google started putting ads on the bottom of the videos, but I am yet to find someone who clicked on any of them.

Where its all great that YouTube is "close to become profitable", this is exactly the same thing that Google said last year.... So how many more years is it going to be close and how many more years after that will if finally pay for itself ?

This blog entry is based on many google search results, including YouTube is now “Almost” Profitable

Test Post

Testing if HTML tags work

This is my test post that I am supposed to make for my class

Greg

PS. Seems as HTML tags are working correctly