[nycbug-talk] interesting read

[Jay Savage]

On 5/23/05, alex at pilosoft.com <alex at pilosoft.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 23 May 2005, Jay Savage wrote:
> 
> > If that's not IT, then what is?  I wasn't talking about the
> > software/firmware that runs EKGs and displays the output over the
> > patient's head; I was talking about the cabling, routing hardware and
> > software, etc., that gets that information to a remote monitoring
> > station--usually over some sort of standard tcp/ip network (usually
> > ethernet), and the OS and userland used to display that information at
> > the remote monitoring station.  Once the information is turned into
> > packets, comes out of a serial or ethernet port, and starts running
> > along cat5, coax, or fiber to a different part of the building, that
> > certainly fits my definition of IT, especially when the results are
> > delivered for local processing and display on a workstation running a
> > different OS than the machine that produced the original output.
> My definition: If lives depend on it, it is not IT - it is life-critical
> application, which should be managed and treated in a way that is totally
> different from your regular IT management.
> 

Different from your regular It management? Yes.  (Hopefully) requiring
special training? Yes.  Still very much "Information Technology"? Yes.
 Of course critical information needs to be treated gently, but at the
end of the day, there are a limited number of ways to get information
from an interface on one mache to the interface of another machine,
and the people who know how to make that happen are, pretty much by
definition, "IT peaople".


> >
> > I can see where there's room for cunfusion, though:  This may be a
> > discussion where anecdotes and examples serve to cloud the issue
> > rather than clarify it.  So let's put it this way:  If the data can be
> > entrusted to any current Windows release, it can certainly be
> > entrusted to a *BSD, or possibly even Linux.  If current Windows
> > workstations were phased out in favor of opensource OS, there would be
> > a significant cost benefit, and probably a significant increase in the
> > stability of the infrastructure as a whole.

> I certainly hope that life-critical applications are not running on
> Windows.
> 

Then you hope in vain, at least as you define "life-critical".  I hope
you don't have cause to go to an emergency room any time soon.  But if
you do, take a close look around.  hospitals consist largely of
embedded systems linked to windows workstations for remote monitoring.
 There is no "HealthCareOS" or something like that.  There is HL7,
which specifies an open medical data protocol, and applications for
dealing with HL7 data can be built in any langauge and for any
platform, and is most often transferred via tcp/ip over twisted pair
or 802.11a/b/g.

No, windows doesn't actually run heart monitors.  And there are other
players: Sun, for instance is a hardware and software partner for
several companies (Welch Allyn for instance).  But unless a nurse is
sitting in your room, there's a better than even chance that it'll be
a windows app that eventually delivers your real time vitals to
whoever is looking for them, and a Windows app that delivers your CAT
scan from radiology to your file, etc., etc.

[snip]


--jay
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