Bill Crounse - Talking hospital tech with CIO of Overlake Hospital

What a fascinating video, and I am only 15 minutes in! Keep up the great work, looking forward to PDC vids!

It's neat to hear from people who are (mostly) outside of the Microsoft bubble.

Keep the videos coming.  This one has helped accellerate an unusually slow Friday afternoon.

This was a terrific video, with a great subject matter. As someone who sells to hospitals and clinics, I gained a lot by listening to the CIO and the physician. Their concerns about technology are different from one I might expect.

Great questions from Robert. They hit some areas that are especially important, like HIPPA, privacy, efficiency and others.

My only criticism is Robert's nervous laughter. It was quite loud and out of place in this environment. Perhaps it was because of the microphone placement. It was distracting. I would recommend trying to tone that down.

Great video, my favorite on Channel 9. You should interview more CIO's. They are sometimes the most interesting subjects. How about Microsoft's CIO? Boeing? Washington Mutual? All are big users of Microsoft technology. Go for it!

Wow, that was actually way more interesting than I thought it would be. It's nice to see people using the technology and are able to speak so well about it.

It's also good that Robert kept the loud laughter down (I'm assuming it's because he was in a hospital with serious guys in suits).

I think it's cool that the guy with the tablet had obviously watched and seen what channel9 was about.

Do you ever see Linux winning the medical market?
It is so critical to have things working that I can't even conceive Linux running on embedded device of a doctor.

scobleizer wrote:

I'm trying to remember not to laugh so much. It's hard, cause it's just something I do.

Laughter is the best medicine

Thank you. A very interesting video. Always nice to hear from the folks who are involved in running the software. Some interesting points about filling in forms and how the fields can sometimes restrict the user rather than help them. (A lesson I've learnt from in the past)

Seeing them carrying around those Tablet PC's makes me wish I could afford one for when I do the 'sales/analysis' part of my job. Sure would be easier than lugging around reams of paper and a laptop.

Fascinating video. My brother was just in Virginia Mason Hospital which the CIO mentioned early on. In order for me to get out at my email, I had to hook my laptop either to the phone in his room or in the visitor lounge area and dial out to an ISP. Wi-fi would have been totally awesome. I also thought the comments about the use of biometrics to ease security and access on the tablet were interesting especially in an environment like this where you are constantly on the move.

I think the walky Channel9 videos are the best, I always know I am in for a good video if there is walking involved.

And I like Scoble's laugh, it lets me know when he is delighted about something. I don't want a stone faced interviewer at all.

I've been doing IT for healthcare here in Los Angeles for the last three years. In the University setting here, Microsoft has very little respect and takes a back seat to vendors like IBM, Sun and Open Source stuff. This make my political life difficult.

It's quite a different tablet world for that hospital for Microsoft employees.

I liked the IT guy at the end, the one not on Microsoft's payrol. He told us something that we all really knew and what we might never have had confirmed if he had not slipped it in, that new avenues of revenue technology is not the real answer.

The big issue was the speed of the wireless network and I appreciated that he had not been informed what to say and the rebuff of the idea that smart clients were the answer, he might not have seen the value in them, but gave an honest answer that increased speeds were what mattered. Scobleizer must have felt that, I've never seen that in a Channel 9 interview, going against the Microsoft vision.

I strongly believe that more outsiders, not even with tertiary relation to Microsoft, should be interviewed. Obviously along side Microsoft representatives to give both sides of the story, but the whole life and death, budget and no-nonsense attitudes of the medics opened up in this video a genuine view of the real world.

I'm sure they feel the same way

Wow, hez a lefty! So many people are left handed that use tablets. The guy that did the enhansement pack demo was a lefty, Bill Gates is a lefty! GO LEFT HANDED PPL!

lol im a lefty you use the opposite side of your brain... leftys make great programmers so im told

Anyway I think its great to see some "REAL WORLD" deployment of what we all love and work on day in day out... Amazing how what we REALLY do affect people's lives, keep it up MSFT!

Good video, as I work in a fringe sector of health care.

Abou 20 mins in there is mention of an SDk specific for healthcare? Or did I mis-understand? Any chance of a link?

<edit>

Even more interesting stuff later on - as we charge for our software on the model mentioned - on a per month basis, rather than a hefty fee. Interesting to see that being looked for.

I guess the UK and US health markets are very different though. here a small company would be unlikely to be writing the kind of software you are talking about for hospitals or general practice, as almost all of that is part of the monolithic NHS. There is currently a MASSIVE project going on to upgrade the NHS medical systems, using .NET. Maybe you could get some info on that here?

mswanson wrote:

We worked a bit with Bill Crounse while architecting and building the NxOpinion diagnostic software. We also worked with Microsoft Research on Bayesian inference techniques to perform very fast and memory efficient diagnostics. If you'd like to see some cool technology and an inspirational video, check out the Technology Case study video in the upper-right corner of the PressPass article.

I haven't watched the video yet, but I'm going to. I just wanted to comment on this.

This is the scariest f'ing thing to do when you are developing a medical record/research system. I'm creating a cancer research system for UW/SCCA now and my biggest fear is that a doc will try to use our system to treat patients. We want them to use our system for quality of care research (e.g. how are my patients that are taking drug x doing? How efficient is this diagnostic technique at detecting this type of cancer) and analytical research ( e.g. what type of people are more likely to get this type of cancer, what types of treatments are more effective with this type of cancer). But I'm not sure we want to try and replace the electronic medical record system. We sure as heck don't want to try and suggest diagnoses to the docs. We are planning on using Baysean inferences, with a little bit of genetic programming, to increase the quality of the queries the docs want to run. Classifying the results into "good data", "Ok data", and "you should review this before you use it data.".

I can't believe the docs would go for letting a computer make a diagnosis for them. Is the system just suggesting possible diagnoses or is it making the diagnosis for the docs?

edit: I wanted to add that the reason we hope the docs aren't making a diagnosis from our application is that we don't think we can gather as much data as the patients paper chart has in it. We don't want the docs to make treatment decisions based on incomplete data. Trying to get data out of decades old, proprietary systems is ...hard.

'nother edit: One question. How is the tablet program at Swedish MC doing? I remember reading a case study on their EMR at the MS site a while back. Somebody from MS approached the SCCA about doing a Tablet pilot project. But their proposal was pretty lame, they didn't really want to push the envelope and we needed them too.  I'm not sure if we took them up on their offer or not. The last time we talked to someone about Tablet PC data entry for our app was in NYC, and it wasn't an MS presentation. It was a lame partner who showed us a lame ink text box. That was about 2 years ago though.

That hostpital sounds really neat, I wanna work there. It sounds quite star treky. If you can track devices, someone should write some software with the voip phone star trek things, where you can say "Where is "name", and it would tell you, it'd be like star trek!

Abbolutely by far one the the best videos to reach Channel 9!  I am also a recently added MS Partner and have plans for that video! 

Barbara Duck
Ducknet Services

Nice job.  This interview really covers the realm of healthcare technlogy.  

Agree the nervous laughter seemed a little annoying but I didn't do the interview so who am I to judge. 

Excellent content!!!

The device is a Vocera badge (VoIP phone) and one of the commands is "Where is Kent" and it will tell you the closest access point to where that person is.

We are about to deploy Cisco's new RFID tracking system that tracks 802.11 b/d devices.  So from any browser with the user appropriate authority you can see where any device is within about 10 feet.