Eric Schmidt was recently at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Annual Conference in Orlando, on February 28th, 2008.  Eric Schmidt presented the keynote and presented the case for why Google is entering the personal health record (PHR) space.  Having personally experienced being misdiagnosed, and being lucky enough to have a pharmacist that asked “What is this for?  Who did you see?  Why couldn’t you see your doctor?  Does the walk-in clinic doctor realize how many drugs you’ve been given”, I am really interested in the PHR space, and thrilled with Google’s new offering.

Since just having a beautiful baby boy join our family, I’ve been more and more interested in how our medical records are stored.  Why do I have to keep a little card of my baby’s immunization record?  What happens if I lose this card?  Why when I visit my family doctor, and then have to go to the hospital for an emergency, do they not have a clue what has been going on with me at my doctor’s office?  Why when my wife’s water broke 3 months ago, did the hospital have to give her drugs she didn’t even need, because they didn’t know her test results because the doctor’s office didn’t open till 8am?  Why do I have to fill out the same form, over and over again?

Is this disturbing anyone else?

Once Central Place for your families Medical Records

Although it currently links into only American locations and Pharmacies, I’m hoping to see their efforts expand to Canada soon.  Over the last week I started entering information into their system, and it was really easy to use, so I decided “I should blog about this! People should know about this great service, it could save some lives!”  So I am.

Below you can see a simple screenshot of Google Health.  Google Health allows you to store and manage all of your health information in one central place. And it’s completely free.  The best part is its not stored in a file folder somewhere in your doctor’s office, it’s not in your house, and it’s not on your home computer in a folder that you won’t have access to when you are in Florida.  It’s “In the Cloud” and you can access it from anywhere within seconds, including your BlackBerry device.

Using the easy to use system, you can build your online health profile, import medical records from various partners including hospitals and pharmacies, learn about healthcare issues, find doctors and hospitals nearby that specialize in what you are looking for, and connect with other online health services.  It’s a mouthful, but it’s needed so badly, and it’s amazing because it’s so simple to use.  The best part about this system is that it will learn and warn you of interactions between drugs.  In my case, had I had all the drugs I was being prescribed about a year ago on file, the system would have warned me not to take them, and list the reasons for me.  As I get older and forget things, like being allergic to Penicillin, Google Health will now remind me, and offices linked into Google Health, of my allergies.

Taking it even further, check out the screenshot above.  Using Google Health’s built in conditions reference system, Google will give me complete detail on any conditions I might have, including illustrations, videos, symptoms, treatments, and even up to date Medical News that is up to date TO THE DAY in some cases from medical journals and associations.  Unbelievably powerful information here.

Software Developers will take this even further

From a developer’s perspective, Google has opened up their Google Health API’s to the world.  If you are an IT professional working in the healthcare space, and want to ensure your data is compliant with Google Health, it’s very easy to offer Google Health compatibility, and in turn, link in with other organizations that are compliant.  Already there are third party tools out there that you can use.  For example, you can add a gadget that runs on your desktop that will alert you of when to take your medication, and allow you to print out a weekly list of the prescriptions you should be taking.

In the United States, the healthcare landscape is much more segmented into silos than that Canadian system due to privatized healthcare.  Why then can’t we in Canada, create a system that links all of our medical records, test results, and other information that is critical to our lives.  Of course it is easier said than done, but at least Google has gotten North America started. 

This is only the Beginning

To be clear, your Public Health Record is only the beginning.  The PHR is a natural fit for Google, but there are hundreds of other areas that need to be explored and developed by the hospitals, pharmacies, and governments themselves.  Imagine having your X-Rays online, your actual test result documentation scanned in.  By building this massive database, people could have the option to share their profiles, and allow the systems to learn to find patterns, and diagnose people more accurately and quickly.  Imagine tying in DNA profiling to a system such as this!  I am personally getting my son’s DNA analyzed by 23andme.com, which will give me a huge advantage into knowing exactly what things I should avoid and be careful with around the love of my life.  Healthcare 2.0 isn’t coming, it has arrived.  It’s just a matter of people paying attention, and putting the effort into making it available to the world.

The possibilities are endless.

Checkout Google Health

Checkout 23andMe

Deep Zoom Composer allows you to quickly import your own images, arrange and position them to your liking, and export the final output as either a Deep Zoom Image or Collection that can be fed into Silverlight’s MutliScaleImage control. This means that you too can use your own images and display them using our Deep Zoom technology.

Deep Zoom is related to the SeaDragon technology that Microsoft has been demoing in their PhotoSynth application.

  Download Deep Zoom Composer

What makes this so powerful, and worth noting on this software development blog is that this is the first time someone has successfully merged web services, with such a “brick and mortar” task, and allowed the world to use it through a simple API.

The new Fulfilment Web Service builds upon the Amazon Fulfilment by Amazon service by adding this impressive programmatic access to the fulfilment process.  Manufacturing companies have been doing similar things for years with EDI, however, the implementation of electronic data exchange is very expensive.  With the new fulfilment web service, amazon finally evolves EDI with Web Services, and brings order fulfilment capabilities to millions of entrepreneurs.

What a smart move by amazon.  The do what they do so well, they are building ways of sharing everything they do well, with the rest of the world, and taking a profit in the process.  Books will be a thing of the past in the coming years.  Sure amazon will still sell books and other merchandise, but they will also be the backbend for many companies.  It just makes sense.

Make sure you check out the Amazon Web Services Blog for more details.

Have you seen Pirates of Silicon Valley?  I love this movie.  It’s basically a docudrama that was made to show the rivalry that existed between Apple and Microsoft (Micro-Soft at the time).  During the movie you get a glimpse into what transpired in the 80′s and 90′s, that brought us the rise of the personal computer, and created the software development machine that is Microsoft.  It’s a cool movie, although my wife would not agree.

Looking at the landscape today, you see a world that has 98% (90% to 98%, depending on what you read, point being, domination) of the machines that access the Internet Windows (Microsoft) based. 

How did this happen?  Was Microsoft first?  Did they have the best platform?  Nay Nay to both.

This all happened before in the land before the web

This story is a story about Silverlight, and how what you are about to see with Silverlight, happened already.

I remember back in the day when Bill Gates and crew were busy working on MS-DOS, and Steve Jobs shows up with his Apple.  Bill Gates was furious that nobody wanted to talk about the PC, and everyone wanted the Apple.  So easy to use, such a nice graphical user interface.  Heck I would have been all over Apple myself! 

Picture a Pontiac Sunfire showing up to a party, only to realize its surrounded by beautiful, hand crafted Aston Martins.  Apple looked unbeatable.  Their passion for beautiful operating systems and beautiful machines was unmatched.  How on earth could Microsoft get attention back on them?

Without going to much into history, Bill Gates became obsessed with creating a better graphical user interface.  The significant difference was Bill Gates and crew did not focus on creating just a beautiful experience, they focused on creating an operating system that would allow developers to easily create applications for their platform.  This is a key point.  This mindset literally changed our lives today!

Microsoft loved what Apple did, and tried to copy it.  They did an ok job, but Vista is no OSX, Bill Gates would even agree.  Apple and Jobs would rant and scream, probably to this day that Microsoft has “No Sense of Style!” (akin to Flash and Adobe posts everywhere slamming Expression Studio and Silverlight), but Microsoft didn’t care because that wasn’t their game.  Heck, they were probably happy at all the attention Apple put on making things beautiful, all the while completely ignoring the bigger issues of software development lifecycles, deployment, architecture, and scalability.

What Microsoft did very well, way better than Apple, was form partnerships with developers, ISV’s, and made it easy for companies to develop software for their operating system through fantastic software development tools.

Developers by the Masses

They made genius innovations like the DLL.  The DLL allowed developers to create tools that could configure themselves dynamically.  They were later extremely smart in looking into the work of Alan Cooper, who would later help Microsoft create Visual Basic, the first GUI form designer and editing tool ever created for Microsoft Windows.  They even allowed, and heavily promoted third party applications to be built to develop Microsoft applications.

Before Visual Basic, it was very hard to create graphical user interface applications.  Some could do it, but it was a very difficult and intense process. You would have to be an expert in a large amount of technologies and programming languages to get things to work just right.

By creating tools for creating windows applications, and creating these tools to work extremely well, Microsoft started drawing large numbers of developers flocking to their development tools.  Why would any developer want to spend time doing things, that with Visual Basic, you could do in a matter of seconds.

Web 2.0 Today

The web has been around forever in tech terms.  But nothing really revolutionary has gone on, besides marketing getting a hold of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and calling it AJAX.  HTML, CSS, the DOM has been around since forever as far as we web is concerned.  Where is the real revolutionary leap?  I mean, sure, you have a ton of Web 2.0 companies coming online, everyone and their dogs are doing start-ups these days, but it’s hard to get everything to work together.  Things are coined “AJAX” and “Web 2.0″, but really, all these technologies are old!

Nobody has really stepped up to the plate and taken a total dominating stance on the web.  Google is pushing applications to the web to “compete” with Microsoft, but has anyone really tried to compete with them?  Is everyone missing the boat completely?

Why hasn’t Google created development tools to develop “Google” applications?  Why hasn’t Facebook?  Why haven’t any of the so called visionary companies out there created a real viable platform for building web applications?  Some of you are thinking they have.  Nay Nay they definitely have not.  They have all created API’s and very simple Wiki documentation surrounding their API’s. Sure the concept of Mashups, XML standards, Web Services is becoming mainstream, but has anyone really taken the time to BUILD the development tools that are needed to build Web 2.0 applications?  Has anyone taken the time, or the ridiculous amounts of money they have, to build a platform on which future web applications can be built?

Microsoft missed the boat on Web 2.0, and the Web in general, and are currently way behind on the advertising side of things, but they have a plan, believe me, and it’s deeper than people think.  What kills me (and almost makes me laugh), is that they have done it before, and nobody seems to see it coming!

Why Microsoft Will Win, and Dominate the Web

You can bash Microsoft all you want, I personally hate the Zune (But the new version is pretty awesome, so I might have to retract that statement soon), but Visual Studio is by far the most impressive development platform end to end, ever created.

Building a “Web 2.0″ application today involves having great designers, php script kiddies, JavaScript guru’s, and mysql database designers and admins working for you.  Everyone is working in different toolset’s, and it’s very hard to get everything to work just right.  Sure you have AJAX, but it’s really just a packaging of scripting technologies, that work fairly slow and clunky in comparison to standard windows applications.

Enter Microsoft.  With the introduction of Silverlight, they are bringing over 20 years of experience building visual, interactive business and shrink wrapped applications, to the web.  That is amazingly powerful.  You simply can’t discount this. It’s so powerful in fact that speaking with Flex developers recently, they even drooled at the things they could conceivably do with a .net/Flash interactive package.  I mean, have you tried building really rich data driven, interactive, cross domain, scalable applications in Flash/Flex?  It’s horrid, if not next to impossible.

Is Silverlight a Flash killer?  No.  Is it intended to be?  Nope.  It’s much more than that.  Will you still see flash animations on sites? Absolutely.  But, will you see real applications on the web, built in “AJAX”/Flash?  Nope, they will be built using Silverlight.  Dare I say, you might someday see Flash running on top of Silverlight!  Why not?

It’s like Chess really…

And now, maybe you start to get it.  Roy Ozzie gets it, Steve Ballmer gets it, and Bill Gates is retiring and not even worried about it.  He’s onto bigger more important things. Like in chess, the other side played its game, which I would equate to repetitive wins using Scholars Mate. Everyone else looked at how easy it was to execute the scholars mate, and just copied it.  Microsoft has a deep playbook, and they are ready to launch their attack, and its not just a one or two piece play, it’s the entire board. Trust me when I say with conviction that Microsoft has an army of .net developers ready to execute one of the most awesome plays you have ever seen, and it ends with developers everywhere winning.  As a consequence, Microsoft wins.  The problem with playing a scholars mate, is you are left in such a bad situation, that the end game is not just a win by the other side (Microsoft), but a clear destruction of the opponent, to the tone of 98% market share…

The bottom line is simple. 

If you want to win in software, make it easy for people to build applications for your product by:

a) providing a platform on which fantastic applications can be built.

b) provide the best development toolset’s you can for your platform.

This is what Microsoft did with Visual Basic for the windows platform, and are now about to do with the Web.

And nobody is going to see it coming. 

People within Microsoft, like Scott Guthrie and John Bristowe see it coming, but mostly everyone else is in denial.  I’m looking forward to renting Pirates of Silicon Valley 2.0 – Silverlight.

I’ve been playing around with WPF, WPF/E (Silverlight) for some time now, and I love the possibilities.  The key’s to its success are mainly developer adoption, and powerful systems. I will leave the getting powerful systems up to Moore’s Law, however, I am going to do my best attempt over the next few months to show developers, and artists, the power of Microsoft Expressions, and all the goodness that WPF and Silverlight bring to the table!  This will be the first run of a pretty heavy technology intensive demo, so if you come out, make sure to be nice!

What I will be showing is nothing you haven’t seen hyped before.  However, during this presentation, we will build the application, run the application, and actually see it working in front of you.  I will be taking the same principles that Johnny Lee and Brian Peek came up with, and applying them to WPF, Silverlight, and real world applications. 

You can register for the event here.

Below is the official Presentation details!  Hope to see you all there!

Featured Product/Topic: Silverlight
Recommended Audience: Software Developers
When: January 29th, 2008 5:45 PM – 8:00 PM
Welcome Time: 5:15 PM Central Time

From Movies to The Real World: Silverlight is here!

Join us on a tour of one of the most exciting, graphic intensive application development platforms to come out of Microsoft in years.  Don’t expect to see hello world or death by PowerPoint during this world wind tour through Visual Studio.net 2008, WPF, Silverlight, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media, and XAML.  This presentation will have you energized and pumped to expand your horizons. Closing the night, users will be allowed to try the application built during the presentation, and believe me, you will want to try this!  If you watched in awe as Tom Cruise navigated a futuristic 3D interface in Minority Report, you will leave this session running home (or driving in this cold) and loading up your development weapons of choice.