DID YOU SEE THIS?
Gates and Windows open to health field
Microsoft CEO keynote speaker at San Diego parley of system users
By Mike Drummond
STAFF WRITER
September 14, 1999
Microsoft employees used to joke that early versions of Windows were like rough, single-ply toilet paper found in lesser motels -- you might not like it, but sooner or later, you'd have to use it.
The Redmond, Wash., giant has since smoothed the wrinkles from its family of flagship operating systems. Windows 98, Windows CE -- the mini-Windows operating system for portable devices -- and industrial-strength Windows NT are running millions of personal computers digital gizmos throughout the world.
And now, having conquered the world of PCs, Microsoft is redoubling its efforts to invade a dozen so called "vertical markets," from retail to real estate to health care.
Clear evidence of this reinvigorated attack comes tomorrow, when Bill Gates, chairman and chief executive of Microsoft, delivers the keynote address for the fifth-annual Windows on Healthcare conference at the San Diego Convention Center. The event kicks off today and ends Thursday.
Microsoft Healthcare Users Group, or MS-HUG, has been holding the event since 1995. Ostensibly independent of Microsoft, the group of technical and software engineers in the health field nonetheless owes much to the Redmond mothership -- particularly this year.
It marks the first time the world's richest man -- worth about $105 billion yesterday, according to one estimate -- has delivered a keynote at the Windows on Healthcare event. As one analyst noted, Microsoft does not deploy Gates lightly.
"This is by far Microsoft's largest presence" at the Windows on Healthcare conference, said Kim Ray, event organizer and general manager for vertical industry programs at Ziff-Davis. "They are putting a tremendous amount of resources into this event."
She expects about 2,000 attendees, about 300 more than last year's event in Orlando, Fla.
Microsoft smells money in the health-care field, which unlike other markets has been slow to embrace the Internet. But hospitals and health-care providers are increasingly cozying up to the idea of "e-healthcare," where billing, patient information, and diagnostic and monitoring data can take place in cyberspace.
This area alone represents a potential $300 billion industry, according to Health Resources Publishing.
Dozens of Internet sites, from drkoop.com to WebMD, offer an array of online medical services.
But that's only part of the equation. Health care organizations also are looking to meld the business side of their computing environments with the patient-care side. In so doing, they often are looking at alternatives to the legacy UNIX mainframe computers in use at two-thirds of U.S. hospitals.
Microsoft would like to replace all of these disparate computing platforms with Windows operating systems, then integrate them with the Web into what Gates refers to as the "digital nervous system."
"There's not enough hours in the day to talk about all the things that are wrong with the health-care system and how the Internet can help," said Eric Brown, an analyst at Forrester Research, which just started covering the health-care field.
The Web offers a standard way for insurers, providers and patients to communicate. Online billing can be done in a matter of days or weeks, instead of months. Patients can communicate with doctors, who can use new Web-based technologies to monitor pacemakers and a host of other medical devices.
Brown noted that many others have tried and failed to seamlessly integrate billing, business and patient information systems.
"Microsoft sees an opportunity that would be a huge win," Brown said. "It could ripple down to backend (computer network) solutions for Microsoft products to be implemented pretty broadly."
Microsoft is making marked inroads into health care. Five years ago there were about three health care-related software applications for Windows NT. Today, there are more than 460, said Paul Smolke, health industry manager at Microsoft.
"Momentum is starting to take hold in the health-care sector," Smolke said. "Health-care organizations are getting more comfortable with security and reliability" of Windows-based platforms."
That confidence has been tested this year with the Melissa virus that attacked Windows-based computers, and more recently with the disclosure of security breaches in the company's free Hotmail e-mail system.
Nonetheless, many hospitals from California to the Carolinas are migrating to Microsoft.
Smolke said that the forthcoming version of Windows NT -- Windows 2000 -- will offer more security features.
All six Scripps hospitals in San Diego County ditched their UNIX mainframe computer systems and made the move to Windows NT and Windows 95 last year.
Ronald Kelley, Scripps' director of technical services, said NT has proved to be a secure platform, but that computers running Windows 95 and Windows 98 on a network are prone to security breaches.
Scripps uses Windows 95 on computers that can't run NT.
Kelley said communication has improved since Scripps deployed Windows on 3,000 desktop computers throughout its health-care system.
"Most of our users . . . are really happy with it mostly because they're familiar with it," Kelley said. "They know how to use it and get things done on their own."
Moreover, it's easier and less expensive to hire people who have expertise in Windows NT than UNIX, Kelley added.
Meanwhile, there are those who, like the traveler with his roll of one-ply at the budget motel, have found that they have to use Windows whether they like it or not.
Consider e.Digital, which makes a flagship product called the Micro OS operating system, a super-small platform used in digital voice recorders for physicians. Doctors record sessions with patients and note medical dosages and other information, which then can be fed into a computer.
The San Diego-based company, formerly known as Norris Communications, signed a $3 million deal with Lanier Worldwide to deliver the devices to health-care providers this year.
In trumpeting its operating system, an e.Digital official told a reporter this year that Windows CE was "bloatware," a derisive term to describe fat, slow software.
Yet not even e.Digital can escape Microsoft.
The digital recorders use a high-speed infrared link or a docking station to transfer voice data files to a computer -- which has to be running Windows.
Copyright 1999 Union-Tribune Publishing Co. |
