October 2007 - Posts
One of the goodies about getting married is that you get to purchase new furniture for your house...mostly the wife's choice...but occassionally..if you are real lucky, you get to pick a few as well. I got married this Jan (2007)...and coincidentally we purchased from Jordan's when the monster deal was running... If the Red Sox win the world series, we get the furniture for free. After their previous win in 2004, I did not have much of faith, but since we both managed to like some furniture there, we went ahead and purchased $2000+ worth of furniture. And at the time of purchase, we were told about the deal...and that off the $2000, we were eligible for $398.00 worth of refund.
After waiting for about 6+ months, the Red Sox win the world series for the 2nd time in 5 years....Yipee !!!
Now that is almost $400 bucks of free money.
A couple of weeks back, while I was contemplating on the health-care software delivery to a wide variety of users, I was inclined to realize that not one mode of delivery (either window-form based or web-form based) was suited to all with the same rate of acceptance. To help understand better, the users of the products/portals we develop include
- Site administrators
- Departmental administrators/supervisors
- Physicians
- Nurse(s), hospital/clinic staff
- Brokers
- Plan administrators
- Company representatives (for small/large groups)
- Underwriters
- Medical underwriters
- Account managers
- Data-entry personnel
- Support personnel
- ....amongst others who are specific to the health insurance company we are working with.
With such a diverse population involved, the need for a web/win application depend on the frequency of usage of the system, and the amount of rich functionality that they require.
For example, a member (like you or me who are getting insurance from a company), will use the application for registering self and family, answering the medical questionnaire that describes the conditions me/my family might have, and a bunch of agreements along with the rates that the insurance company may want to offer. After this, a member's interaction with the system is mostly for routine stuff like
- Change the Primary Care Provider (PCP)
- Change his address (so long as he/she is under the insurance coverage)
- Change his contact details
- Check out the claims submitted/approved/rejected (depending on how much the insurance company wants you to see)
A member is a perfect example of designing a member portal as a regular web-application on any browser.
However, when the staff members, underwriters, administrators, physicians want to use the same system, they are certain to have much more richer functionality than a web-application can seem to offer. Even with the latest advancements in web technology, the gap between rich client applications and rich Internet applications is still there. With such a requirement to meet to cater the needs of diverse sects in the intended population, there needs to be a hybrid approach or maybe a completely new revolutionary approach.
- Sandboxing : This is the process of customizing the intended browser to make it more distraction-free, and clutter free. One approach to do this would be to strip the browser of everything and just keep the shell with a status bar that hopefully will be used as a regular one along with taking care of the settings for the shell. As I learnt today, Mozilla is coming up with something very similar in theory, and it has been christened as "Prism". Though their concept is similar to mine, there remains an imminent issue of making it absolutely generic to support all kinds of clients, many an issue can come up thanks to the varied style of handling JS, CSS and the programming language of choice. However, in all honesty, I don't think this would be an issue by the time they get it out to the public.
- Always-connected : This approach would simply ask one to develop both windows applications and web-applications. Agreed that this is kind of a nightmare for small companies, but take the case of MS Money suite, and the newly released MS Healthvault. The idea of having a windows-app and a web-app at the same time is giving the end-user the choice of picking his/her comfort level, and catering his/her needs the same way irrespective of his/her choice. Unless there comes a time when the slowest internet-connection available has upload/download speeds at a minimum of 4Mbps/4Mbps respectively. Google gears also does a good job of this with Google Gears, but the technology has a long way to go to be mature and widely accepted. Trust in the storage provider is a major hurdle in this approach. How many of you would trust your health-information to any one other than yourself and your doctor. Heck, we don't even have an option to opt out of "web-access" to the insurance company portals showing everything about you and your family's health.
- Web-desktop : There are a few approaches in this direction, however none are competent enough to provoke a shift in healthcare delivery.
In conclusion, depending on the size of the health-care company, one would choose either Sandboxing or Always-Connected approach. However, unless the web app technologies comes up with some ground-breaking advancements, this is what the future of healthcare delivery will be.
I work in the healthcare industry, and I write code that deals with patient records when they are most important : at the point of care. So, I have been researching on what would be helpful to make the process of dealing with patients in hospitals more simpler, efficient and streamlined.
My company's current approach has been to deliver information via the network on web-applications, there by reducing the overhead costs involved in deploying windows forms based applications. With the current win-web divide rapidly deteriorating, I see web-apps as the most sensible option as well.
However, the end system was always more of a concern to me. Pressing issues like :
- Network bandwidth usage.
- Security concerns over sensitive-data transfer.
- Storage and Backup
- End-user screen resolution
- Color-choice
- Hand-writing recognition.
- Speech storage and Speech-to-text conversion
amongst others have been pressing concerns so far. I shall go into further detail about health-care technology delivery concerns in a different post some other time.
Then I recently I saw what Philips had to offer.
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This is the older version with Win XP pre-installed in it. For a list of all the features, look here.
CliniScape
The latest version comes with Windows Vista. For a list of all the features , look here
Quick take : Seems impressive on the first take, but how comfortable is something of this nature to hold in your hand, and operate ! Once or twice ... maybe yes...not always.
Its funny when you come across sites that try and tell what kind of blogger you are ! I stumbled upon this via one of my subscribed blogs (CSS Juice). And apparently, this is what they have to say about me ...
I will be performing server maintenace on the
communityserver installation starting Oct 20, 2007 (11.45pm) to Oct 21, 2007 (00:45am). Proposed upgrades/maintenance
- Upgrading from CS 2007 to CS2007.1
- Converting from "Blog at Folder" to "Blog at root"
- Setting Google Analytics tracker code.
- Setting links to bookmarking sites (DZone, Digg, Reddit, etc).
- Blog theme change.
- Website logo/header change.
The rest of the changes will be updated in a "Release Notes/History" section to follow soon.