Google Health Launches

It's live. Open for business. The first two hospitals to offer a CCR export to your PHR: Cleaveland Clinic and Beth Israel. More will follow suit, I'm sure. I wish Google luck and may the best PHR win.

The Announcement

The blogs are a-twitter, sort of... Technorati has a few hits.

There's also a snarky but good discussion on this blog by a local med student. Go Trees, beat Cal, etc.

The app itself has a ways to go. Google Minimalism probably isn't what I want to manage my health. In fact, it looks like the application my team built five years ago, but less sophisticated (sorry Google -- you know it's true). For one thing we apply existing access rules derived from the EMR itself. We also have the best find-a-doctor, but whatever. Clearly Google's intent is not to create a consumer product, but a reference implementation for all those start-ups and dreamers looking at the size of the health care market right now. At this point anyone could hit on the killer app. All you need is an SDK, the right idea, one computer and a lot of gumption. Nobody knows what online health care will look like yet. It's sure not going to look like those paper charts designed in the 1800s that doctors will continue using until we come up with something better.

We Are All Proactive Now

I think the term "proactive" should be taken off the list of buzzwords. I have heard that word so much lately I think we should just bite the bullet and make it an honorary member of our everyday lexicon.

I remember a time when the word was reserved for thinking outside the box, stepping out of the comfort zone, shifting the paradigm, or (more specifically) incompetent people trying to sound smart. Lately, though, with increasing productivity demands of the modern workplace, the word is being thrown rapid fire around every corner of the office. No longer a special case, proactiveness is now expected as an everyday proactivity. And it's become a freebie score in Buzzword Bingo.

I don't see why proactive is such a special concept anyway, it only means doing things actively. Can things be done any other way? Sure, I can be inactive or reactive or even surrealistically quasi-active, but when what you're after is good old fashioned get-r-done gumption-fueled tenacity, nothing beats being proactive.

Besides, when you think about it, proactive is really just a polite way of saying, "You know what to do, just get off your ass and do it!"

At my workplace, we are constantly reminding each other to be proactive.

The Pilot Collection Grows

I was down at Weird Stuff yesterday and they had a huge box of old PDAs. Now this is one focus of my collection, so sifted through those boxes until after closing time. I found a nice set of m-series devices and an original US Robotics cradle. Here you can see my newly expanded collection arranged on the coffee table.

Starting at the bottom left, going counter-clockwise: US Robotics Pilot 1000, the grand-daddy of them all; A Palm IIIe Special Edition (this one got me through the 90s in geek style); a Palm VII Wireless; Palm IIIc (their first color PDA), and finally the m-series: m100, m150, and m130.