Productized what wired into what now?

First, a small warning: I am having an extremely crowded and busy week, so blogging here (even the catchup I need to do to the many excellent comments on the Battle of the Opens post) will suffer.

Something for folks to chew on in the meantime: can anybody explain to me what this tool (if it is a tool) actually does? I clicked over thinking it might be a good thing to add to a tidbits post, but I confess myself wholly flummoxed by the jargon therein.

Any ideas, anyone? Especially anyone with a health-care background?

More like this

sounds like they just added an API layer to their system? i think i need to find a way to slip 'bringing speed to value' into a conversation at some point to see what looks i get...

They are hoping to capitalize on the current push towards universal digital health records with this "open" http access to their back end health record database service. Authors of the applications you probably use will be - perhaps - interested in taking advantage of this.

I'm somewhat doubtful that a universal service is achievable in the US style of business practices. To be universal there would have to be only one place to go to to get either directly or indirectly to any given patient's information for review or update, and that smacks of guvmint and that's a no-no, so we are going to see many systems like this springing up offering such services. So "Universal" is going to be fragmented, although it may be equal access, and patients cary cards with their backend service ID to the database rather than the hospital. More outsourcing, and it might even end up off-shore and lose even more jobs. Such has the race to the bottom of "free enterprise" become.

Note that they are not selling a web page for you to browse to - they are selling a back-end only data service that requires a middle-ware program to make sense of. Third parties provide those.

By graygaffer (not verified) on 18 Mar 2010 #permalink

Until I saw evidence above that some commenters apparently believed in it, I was inclined to (1) check the date... no 1 April is next week, but still (2) blame one of those automated gobbledegook sentence builders. I think someone somewhere is wetting themselves at their hilarious joke...

By Chris Rusbridge (not verified) on 23 Mar 2010 #permalink