Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Free Cloud Based PHR (Personal Health Record)

What happens in case of a medical emergency? You are out of station, far away from your near & dear ones, met with an accident, sort of emergency. What’s the best way to help your attending physician to take crucial decisions of drug related allergies or medical history?

Personal Health Records (PHR) may come to your rescue if you’ve maintained one.

Wikipedia defines PHR as:

“A health record that is initiated and maintained by an individual. An ideal PHR would provide a complete and accurate summary of the health and medical history of an individual by gathering data from many sources and making this information accessible online to anyone who has the necessary electronic credentials to view the information.”

Microsoft-HealthVault-Free-Cloud-PHR

Optional Info:

Though PHR may sound like an EHR(Electronic Health Records) there’s a marked difference between the two. A PHR is initiated by an individual whereas an EHR is initiated by the health care providers and may be legally mandatory in most of the countries.

Google-Health-Cloud-PHR

Free Cloud Based PHR

  • Google Health
    • Available everywhere without any restriction.
    • Import medical records from hospitals & pharmacies.
    • Sign up & Access through Gmail Account.
    • It’s not only a storage, you can also produce intelligent reports/charts for analysis.

Important Update: Google Health is retiring January 1, 2012; data available for download through January 1, 2013. Read the official announcement at Google Blog.

  • Microsoft HealthVault
    • It’s a platform that can be integrated with many PHRs.
    • It can be used by health care providers (i.e. EHR)
    • There are many compatible devices (pedometers, blood pressure monitors, weight scales) that can be connected to HealthVault connection center to upload your device data directly to HealthVault record.
    • Currently launched only for two countries: US & UK
    • Sign up & Accessed through Windows Live Id.

Benefits of a Cloud Based PHR

  • Organize your health info in one place.
  • Gather your health/medical records from hospitals, doctors and pharmacies.
  • If you wish, Share your info securely with your doctor, health care provider or family member.
  • Analyse & gain insight from your health records.

PHRs can Include following Information:

  • Medications (doses & frequency).
  • Allergies
  • Drug interactions
  • Illnesses & Hospitalizations
  • Surgeries
  • Immunization
  • Test results
  • Insurance
  • Family history
  • Fitness records (weight, height etc)

Sign up for these Cloud Services?

Suggestions

Sharing personal medical information is a sensitive issue. Though a PHR empowers you as you are in complete control of your own profile (you decide what you want to share & what you want to keep private) sign up for these services after reading & understanding the Privacy Policies of the corresponding service provider:

Cloud Articles

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

HP + Bharti intend to Offer Cloud Services to SMBs

If the deal goes through, it’ll be a good news for the thousands of SMBs / SMEs in India, who are still waiting for their 1st affordable Cloud Application. At a later stage, a few more players may pitch in to make it a more meaningful deal. It may also prompt a few other partnerships by other cloud vendors for affordable solutions for SMBs/SMEs. I bet there’s a billion dollar opportunity & there’s indeed a gap to be filled when it comes to IT implementation in SMBs. In contrast to the sky rocketting prices of traditional model of software development, Subscription based Pay-Per-Use model of cloud apps (SaaS) is the main attraction when it comes to implementing applications for SMBs. If you are not so convinced about the existing opportunities, read here Cloud Computing: A Catalyst for IT adoption in SMEs/SMBs

Cloud-Partnership-HP-Bharti

As HP is a leader in IT infrastructure equipments, it can take care of the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) layer of the Cloud i.e. Data Center. The Indian telecom giant Bharti (It offers Telecom Services with Airtel brand name) will offer its optical fibre network and bandwidth to cloud data centers. Read press report here HP, Bharti in talks to offer cloud services for SMBs.

What we Expect from this Joint Cloud Initiative?

  • As both the player’s core strength doesn’t lie in the other two cloud stack i.e. PaaS and SaaS; it’ll be interesting to see which cloud platform (PaaS) support they are offering. There are various choices, but in my view the best option, which covers most of the development tools and programming languages is Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform. It offers multiple development tools & languages to choose from; viz. .NET (C#, VB.Net, C++), Ruby, PHP, Python and Java. By default it supports Visaul Studio IDE, apart from that it also has plug-ins for Eclipse. Moreover, if you can have the development platform in-premise you can port your cloud app to your in-premise environment and vice-versa. Unlike in the past, it ‘seems’ Microsoft intends to make Windows Azure an Open Platform.  
  • Also, from a developers perspective, the offerings should be cheap or free till the service gets a significant number of users/customers. Pricing wise something like Google App Engine! In the long run, with a proper strategy these data centers may empower a developer or a group of developers to create their own cloud application at a ridiculously low price and offer them as a service. Power to innovate! for Cheap & Best service.
  • There are other PaaS as well which I am not so familiar with to offer my suggestions: Check here for Emerging PaaS.

What do you expect?

Cloud Articles at Techno-Pulse

Friday, May 14, 2010

Microsoft leaps into the Cloud – Office Web Apps

With the yesterday’s worldwide launch of Microsoft Office Web Applications for the business customers, the cloud war is getting fierce. "A lot of people say we will see pigs fly before we see Microsoft Office running in the cloud," said Tim O'Brien, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy. MS has proved them wrong & is betting big on Cloud Computing. The launch of Microsoft’s one of the most lucrative & successful products is a testimony to the fact that though MS is a late entrant its quite serious about the new trend.

MS-office-2010-web-apps-cloud

Perhaps MS Office is one of the most popular products till now, consumed by millions of user around the world on a daily basis. Though there are many options, even today it’s difficult to think of a computer without MS office. Back in 2006, Google launched Google Docs – a product similar to MS Office but with a different delivery model – documents/apps accessed using a browser, without installing any software. Google docs has become very popular with the retail consumers but is yet to gain a sizeable chunk in enterprise market.

As per Forrester Research estimates, Google’s share (in %) in this segment is still limited to single digit whereas MS Office is leading the office productivity app competition with a comfortable margin, as 81% of businesses are religiously using MS office. May be the users are so comfortable & familiar with the omnipresent MS Office that they can’t think of anything else. Lately Microsoft realized this and has innovated itself to make its presence felt in in the web sphere.

The free to use consumer (individual users) version of Office Web Apps is scheduled to be launched in June. It’ll be available via a windows live account. Definitely the consumers will hugely benefit with the cloud war. Only time will tell who will emerge as the winner: though entering late in cloud-sphere, will the biggest IT giant specializing in desktop software turn the table in its favor or   will it be the most innovative web company?

Only time will tell…wait & watch.

Cloud Computing Articles at Techno-Pulse