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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (19025)	8/29/2010 3:26:46 PM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Yes, USA has the "problem" that you standardized on the british inch, reducing the need for the metric system. It is no longer than 20 years ago, that I had conversion problems, too, because I created a system for small print shops, which was based on font sizes on points, which are defined as 72 points = 1 inch. Unfortunately, the British inch is 2.54cm, and the Danish/Norwegian inch is 2.62cm (originally it was the same as the Prussian inch at ~ 2.615cm but modern trade rounded it), so the Danish fonts were slightly larger and this made it impossible to use the point metrics from Microsoft Windows... but in the 1990s, printing in Europe has standardized on U.S./British inches and points for font sizes in order to be able to use standard programming interfaces in Windows and other computer operating systems. In the medical industry, the unit conversion is not only about inches and meters and Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, but also about tradition for what to measure. Then there is mmHg, mmH2O, bar and kPa, but also mmol vs. gram. And then there's the difference in equipment, like measuring hematocrite vs hemoglobin. All Danish ICUs have an automated mini-laboratory in the department for some very frequent blood sample measurements, whereas other countries often use the hospital laboratory for all measurements, which leads to different types of measurement methods. Things get really annoying when the doctors are used to see the same value with different measurement units in different contexts that are internationally standardized. For instance, one score may use mmHg and another kPa, whereas the equipment may display something else on it's knobs. This makes it virtually impossible to show the same measurement using the same numeric value in different contexts, and then true ingenuity is needed to make doctors feel safe about the system. When paper-based systems are converted to IT systems that integrate all work processes in a department, you find out about all these peculiarities.