[OT] Idle musings about health care in the US

[walt <wa1ter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[PLTL] - Obama names doctor to clear health care paper swamp
Last Updated: 2009-03-20 18:05:48 -0400 (Reuters Health)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama named a Boston
doctor and Harvard professor on Friday to lead his $20 billion
dollar effort to modernize the disparate and paper-dominated
health care system in the United States.

Dr. David Blumenthal will become the National Coordinator for
Health Information Technology, charged with implementing health
information technology provisions of Obama's recently passed
economic stimulus package.
=========================================================

I can't explain why, exactly, but when I read this article I
immediately thought of DragonflyBSD.

Converting our creaky old medical cottage industry into a new
streamlined and paperless enterprise will obviously require
enormous computing resources -- reliability above all, and
then even more reliability on top of that.

A centralized database of everyone's complete medical records
(it seems to me) is just not going to be adequate.[1]  What's
needed is redundancy and remote backup/restore and a completely
self-checking and self-correcting network (sounds like the ARPA
net to me ;o)

If this is not exactly what Matt had in mind when he started
Dragonfly, then it at least seems parallel to it, rather than
orthogonal.

Just my thoughts.  Any comments welcomed.


1.  CVS versus git/hg/bitkeeper, et al?