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by chimeracoder 4393 days ago
> It's extremely hard to crack healtcare, it's very closed, defensive system of people and bureaucracy, Apple might just have the power to do it.

Care delivery is also an industry in which Apple has virtually zero market share - it's Microsoft through and through. Inpatient and outpatient EHRs all target Windows, hospital IT all runs Windows Server, and some of the more "forward-thinking" hospitals are even eyeing Windows tablets (I kid you not).

Potentially huge upside for them (which is obviously why they want to do it), but it's very difficult to penetrate, and they have almost no foothold there so far.
2 comments
daigoba66 4393 days ago
> Inpatient and outpatient EHRs all target Windows

I believe this is primarily because the development environment is really simple for this class of software. Platforms such as .NET, COM, MFC and VB have been around a long time and it's easy to find programmers. It also doesn't hurt that the desktops running Windows are incredibly inexpensive and easy to procure and run Microsoft Windows.

But targeting the end users of healthcare (e.g. patients)... that's something else entirely which only recently has started to have any traction.

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revelation 4392 days ago
It certainly helps that Microsoft actually has Software for enterprise. Apple killed the Server stuff years ago and there have never been strong provisions for managing client installations.
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ashearer 4393 days ago
While Microsoft has a large footprint in healthcare IT (and so do mainframes), SaaS is huge and becoming even more important, and there the server OS doesn't matter much to the customer.

That said, what Apple announced was patient data collection support in the client OS. App developers take care of shipping it to physicians and hospitals. Apple isn't taking the patient's information the last mile to physicians themselves.

Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of a startup dedicated to improving mobile patient and physician communication (Care Thread, http://www.carethread.com). We already integrate with hospital and doctor's office workflows, and we've been looking forward to the introduction of this feature in order to collect relevant patient data.

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