Information Universality

Posted on | March 22, 2008 | Comments Off on Information Universality

In the future patients will come to us; they now come only if they absolutely must

Life’s crazy – between the economy, Iraq, race relations, gender relations, “made in China” – well, we have a lot on our minds, and not much extra time, and even less extra cash. Multiply that up to the national level and throw in aging demographics and growing consumer awareness and knowledge in all matters “health”, and change becomes a merger of time efficiency, convenience and effectiveness. Which means? Which means not what we have now. Which means change. That’s why my mind wants to go to “consumer” not “provider” for transformational solutions; and wants to go to ‘technology” not “bricks and mortar” for cost-effective prevention and health solutions.

Case in point: “Lifespan Planning Records”, a killer application off of a consumer (ie Google Document-like platform) that invites docs and nurses to join the party rather then run the celebration. Naysayers still give me funny looks when I raise this. They’re politely dismissive, as the reasons for failure (too complex, massive privacy concerns, people not that motivated, and on and on) reinforce and agregate inside their heads. But increasingly, those in the know, know which way to lean.

Take Douglas Merrill, Google’s CIO. Here’s what he said in part in a WSJ interview on security, access, efficiency and capacity.

“Google’s model is choice. Choose from a bunch of different machines and different operating systems. We offer a lot more self-service. We allow all users to download software for themselves. The traditional security model is to try to lock down endpoints. We put security into the infrastructure. I had to build this massive infrastructure to run Google, so adding (everyone’s) enterprise data is not a big deal. I already had to build security standards because search logs are really private. We don’t have a security priesthood: Every engineer is trained. We use automated tools that check every engineer’s code. We’re able to invest in information security in a way that most people aren’t. We did it because of search. Google Apps is hosted on my infrastructure anb costs roughly $50 a seat. You can go from an average of 50 megabytes of storage to 10 gigabytes and more.. There’s better response time, you can reach e-mail from anywhere in the world, and it’s more financially effective. In some sense Google Apps is just a byproduct.”

And the Lifespan Planning Record – with unlimited data capacity, unrivaled security, accessible by you and your care team any time, anywhere, on any machine, and for free – will soon be a Google App!