Saturday, October 25, 2008

HealthVault Express

I was planning a post this AM, and my internet is flaky, fortunately I use Live writer from Microsoft. It's a simple task to write off line and then save a draft and/or upload to the blog.

The internet is a complex "spider" of networks and supposed redundancy. This morning I only have access to google, and whatever is on their servers. The rest of the bilions of sites are unavailable.  I guess Google will save the world. I wonder if HealthVault is up.

This brings to mind the fallibility of all things electronic. Imagine you are at your docs office and he want to pull up your PHR which is stored in Healthvault and/or Google Health. What now?

Or how about your front or back office running an EMR on as asp solution?  Nada!!  Although not requiring much hardware investment and offering 24/7 maintenance .asp solutions are not as cheap as you might think.

That's the downside....

The upside is that my internet has never has gone down for more than an hour or so.  But never say never...I live in a fairly metropolitan area of Southern California.

With a client-server configuration, I have personally been the victim of servers, client work stations fizzle out and be down for a day or even up to a week while a part or major component is replaced, along with the software that may have been lost. Not a happy situation either.

More bad news....I called my ISP to see just how long the outage will  be.  I received one of those messages. "We are experiencing an outage in your area"  (how do they know  where I am...must be one of those caller ID thingys.  The voicemail was upgraded to

"If you would like a call when the technical difficulty is fixed, push one.  (how do they know I don't have a rotary phone?_) For you late season "boomers" go to wikipedia or google....  "we will call you back between the hours of blah blah blah...  This does not sound good.  How will they voicemail blast this message?  

 

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