WebOS Gets Surprise Second Life in Healthcare

I've always felt that the chief problem with webOS was that it was only "kind of" open.

It's good to see that making it "really" open appears to be making it a more useful -- and hopefully more attractive, more marketable -- product.

I spent an inordinate amount of time, wandering various hallways and rooms within two major hospitals in the past year. Diane's stroke had her everywhere from ER to OR, Telemetry, intensive care and various levels of hospital rooms. In each place, regardless of the mission of that place, they were running Windows XP Pro. That bothered me to the point of even bringing it up a couple of times and the response was?

"It works for us".

And I guess that's all it really comes down to. If it works, it works but for how long. Can you imagine the panic when XP is finally dropped? That would be worth the price of a ticket to watch.

> Can you imagine the panic when XP is finally dropped? That would be worth the price of a ticket to watch.

Their IT staff will be tasked with upgrading everything to Windows 7 in the first quarter of 2013. And they'll upgrade whatever hardware needs to be upgraded at that time. Any applications which won't run in Windows 7 will be run in XP mode. If that doesn't work, specific machines will be exempted and allowed to keep XP until replacement or upgraded applications are found.

Can you tell I've been through this before? :)

Holy Cr@p! Now I understand why 4 aspirin to a hospital room are billed at 2.50 each.....it helps cover their IT upgrades.

Hmm! Is that why some call it the best health care system in the world?

@Fettoosh: "Hmm! Is that why some call it the best health care system in the world?"

They do? A loosely-knit collection of private companies funded by an administration system of insurers designed solely to pull a large proportion of the funding out to shareholder pockets. That's a very interesting use of the word "system" :D

> Is that why some call it the best health care system in the world?

Well, to be fair, the times I'm talking about having been through this aren't at a hospital, but all large corporations tend to work the same, and anyone who thinks hospitals aren't large corporations hasn't been paying attention.

We got notified back in December that they want everyone upgraded to Windows 7 by June. I have something on the order of 140 machines here with XP on them. There is no "upgrade" from XP to 7. It's a complete wipe and reinstall. With software and data restore it takes a minimum of 4 hours per machine. For people who have lots of specialty software, it can take close to a day and a half. So say 6 hours per machine average. 6x140=840. 840/8=105 days. That's 3.5 months of doing nothing but upgrading machines to Windows 7. Yeah, that's going to happen. We'll be lucky if everyone is upgraded by the end of the year. :( Everyone else in my group is pretty much in the same boat.

It's going to be entertaining upgrade cycle.

Quoting:That's a very interesting use of the word "system" :D

A system of blood sucking network of corporations (insurers, hospitals, and medical groups), that should clear it up!

Thank-you Fettoosh.

This last week-end, some friends of mine were trying to figure out how vampires (and zombies) had become so popular in american pop culture, yet again. I think we all over-looked the obvious...