Netbooks: the Saviour of Healthcare IT?

It's a banality to state that Healthcare IT is hopelessly out-of-date.  Actually, hospitals are often full of gleaming new equipment and are constantly upgrading their infrastructure. The problem  is that while the assorted blocks of hardware and software in a healthcare system are often very sophisticated in themselves, they typically don't connect to each other, or to their users, in a very effective manner. Printers, faxes, and paper filing cabinets form the real backbone of the system.

To date, much of the industry focus on addressing this has been to:
1. painstakingly join together the existing pieces, in a never-ending integration project
2. create a new, overarching backbone which all pieces connect to (NHIN, Microsoft Vault, etc)

On the sidelines of these behemoth activities, however, are some smart companies with a different approach, taking ubiquitous connectivity as a starting point and offering simple SaaS solutions to the healthcare industry.

What does this really change?
- The flexibility of the web allows an ease of continuous improvement to functionality and user experience that is otherwise impossible
- You still have lots of specialist blocks of functionality to join together, but they're all in the cloud already.  Connect them once, and they're connected for all users.  Update them once, and they're updated for all users.
- Healthcare professionals can collaborate by working on the SAME data, not different copies of it
- Every connected device can become a health IT entry point.  With 3.5B cellphones and 1B+ PCs out there, that's just huge.

So where do Netbooks come in?
Well, basically Netbooks have two characteristics:
1. They're really, really cheap
2. They're made for doing everything online (and aren't really powerful enough to do anything locally)

The positive reinforcement loop I hope for from these 2 characteristics are:
1. Healthcare institutions start buying netbooks as a cheap Point-of-Care computing solution
2. Due to the inherent nature of the netbook, SaaS and cloud computing solutions will be preferred for them
3. Users will discover, accidentally, the other advantages of SaaS solutions and start to demand them also on other computing platforms
4. Solution providers will discover an endless variety of innovation opportunities that spring from data being available on the internet and easily sharable with standard security protocols
5. We finally get the long dreamed-of 'medical mash-up ': systems that pull together relevant health and non-health data from a plethora of sources and present it in a way that is meaningful for a given user, for purposes ranging from clinical decision-making to behavioural motivation, education to epidemiological analysis

The resulting potential to reduce error, improve collaboration, and drive efficiency needs a much longer and more learned analysis than I can provide: but I am convinced it can be measured not only in billions of dollars, but also thousands of lives. 

- Thomas Sutton