Software giants are comming into the health care sector, how it will affect you in your profession?

[Abbas Shojaee]

Software Giants (e.g. Microsoft, Google etc.) are coming into health care sector and looking for long term strategic goals, they provide cheap or free but enriched infrastructures for end users. I think that their presence and game playing will affect all of existing players (Health care consumers, personnel, organizations, regularities and auditories, governments, IT departments, open source and even academies) .

Health care consumes large amounts of GNP, specially in well developed countries. Making small enhancements lead in displacement of great dollars. Off course it is not a trend yet, in my humble opinion governing the Health care data will be a great source of power and will form the next wave of power seeking and consequent challenges (after the search engine fight). So giants along with many interest groups (OS community, users community etc.) are coming in.

Lets share our idea on what is happening on the horizon? How it will affect us in our profession?

Links:
http://healthvault.com/index.html?rmproc=true
http://www.microsoft.com/industry/healthcare/technology/default.mspx
http://www.google.com/intl/en-US/health/about/index.html

[Dr Vikas Gaur]

Dear Dr Abbas,

I totally agree with you that there entry in the field of Health Informatics is going to revolutionize a lot of trends in the arena of Health Informatics.In my opinion it will some how benefit the field of Informatics as a whole.

All of these giants are entering this field nearly at the same time I guess, and this will create intense competition and the fight for supremacy just like that for the search engine where google is the winner ??

Many government themselves are trying to do the same thing (ex NHS in UK)and it will be interesting to see who wins the confidence of health care consumers.

Ultimately the Health care consumers are going to be the one who are benefited the most,and also there will be enormous new job opportunities for the Health Informatics specialist as a whole.

I consider this as a positive change,although this is my personal view,don't know what other people think about it.

Cheers

Dr Vikas

[DR.NILOUFAR MASOORI]

Dear Dr Abbas
i agree with you too and i think the new job opportunity is a good chance for health informatics professionals .

[Benjamin Littenberg]

I fully agree. The entry of corporate super-powers into the arena may accelerate the adoption of some de facto standards, which would be a good thing. They may also accelerate the move of infrastructure and design issues to the background (as they have for media distribution, personal productivity, and gaming, for instance) and put more focus on the actual information content of the application. Once we can easily exchange and integrate health information, we will need to focus more on just what that information means. Then, I believe the full scope of the quality problem in medical records will become much more apparent. If we start to actually use data from histories, physical examinations and image interpretations, for instance, we will run right into the problem that they are very poor quality. The same x-ray read by the same radiologist a month later gets the opposite interpretation more than 5% of the time! The agreement among expert physical examiners on the presence or absence of a fourth heart sound is essentially zero.

The next great challenge will be to re-engineer the systems in the clinical settings which generate the information that gets into our HIT systems. As always, "Content is King."

[Abbas Shojaee]

Dear Vikas

Thank you for sharing your ideas. Concerning governments' involvement I think that their best role would be augmenting auditory and standardization bodies and promoting private sector competition. This is what seems that Obama is going to do. I think that government manipulations (e.g. UK approach) will fail in mid and long term competition with coming quality and quantities.

Regards.
Abbas

[Abbas Shojaee]

Dear Benjamin

As you highlighted precisely, there will be an important paradigm shift: "the move of infrastructure and design issues to the background". Usually large software companies try to win the competition land by promoting software development SMEs with providing prepared infrastructures and ready to use components plus accompanying APIs.

As you mentioned I think this will shift the focus from creating proper software components for handling different issues (e.g. medical informatics standards, user interface, data integration, confidentiality and security etc.) to providing better or more in depth services (e.g. better content, data mining and analysis, artificial intelligence applications, more focus on consumer and community health informatics etc.).

I think that in a different manner (e.g. from the view point of Web 2 and Web 3, AI etc.), some of new hot areas will be: Data, Usability, Integration, Community, Consumers, Availability and more focus on academies and research issues.

It worth mentioning that yet these giant companies are not in right direction. They just began examining the field and their approach is providing their own proprietary product and services, but I think that soon it will change to supporting SMEs.

So it might be useful for non giants to get prepare for moving their legacy products onto coming infrastructures and for professionals to follow the trend and get more familiar with this tools instead of building from the ground.

As a follow up to Benjamin's comment, lets discuss what would be other possible paradigm changes? from what to what?