At the doctor’s office this morning, I was greeted with the letter shown in the photo: “We are in the process of converting our manual records to EMR (Electronic Medical Records).”

Like most healthcare practices, they are switching to electronic medical records. As you would expect, there was a young lady scanning all the old paper records into the computer.

But six months after they switched to EMR, patients still have to fill-out a small stack of paper forms (They asked for my name, birthday, and contact information five times.) You can fill-out the forms on their website, they say. But when I checked, all they had was links to download the paper forms ahead of time.

I filled out all the forms and then watched as an assistant typed my information into a laptop. I think they missed the point.

Across town, my orthodontist had a computer setup at reception where patients entered their own information directly into the computer…fifteen years ago.

This post is not to single-out one doctor’s office. The reality is every business has its own version of the paper patient form (tell me again why I have to wait in line to talk to someone to check into a hotel?).

Technology does not automatically make operations better. You have to change the workflows, too.

A smash-up of all of Jim and Dwight’s pranks from the Office.

(Source: http)

Wired has an article on Marc Lucovsky and Cloud Foundry. Lucovsky is famous for creating Windows NT, Google’s AJAX API…and for dodging a chair thrown by Steve Ballmer

when he walked into Ballmer’s office and told the Microsoft CEO he was leaving the company for Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and chucked it across the room. “Why does that surprise anyone?” Lucovsky tells Wired.com, seven years later. “If you play golf with Steve and he loses a five-cent bet, he’s pissy for the next week. Should it surprise you that when I tell Steve I’m quitting and going to work for Google, he would get animated?”

Cloud Foundry a platform for building web apps:

In short, the platform is a way for software developers to build web applications, deploy them to the net, and scale them to more and more users as time goes by — all without having to worry about the computing infrastructure that runs beneath them. “It lets you worry about the app,” Collison says, “and not virtual machines or what operating system they’re running or all this other stuff.” VMware offers the platform as an online service at CloudFoundry.com, and in open sourcing the project, it hopes to spawn an army of compatible services and push the platform into private data centers.

Read the article: Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair to Build ’21st Century Linux’

Insurance agency Adriana’s Insurance has 35 locations across southern California. In 2009, they chose a unified XO Communications solution for all their locations.

The result? XO’s MPLS, IP Flex, PRI and Hosted SMS solutions have allowed them to accommodate massive growth, centralize network services with one vendor, improve disaster recovery, and streamline and simplify network management.

“Our employees are not limited by our older network solutions.” said Sergio Gomez, director of IT for Adriana’s. “We don’t have to increase bandwidth if an office goes from eight to sixteen lines.”

Download the Adriana’s Insurance Case Study

You can find more customer testimonials at xo.com.

via the Big Think

Bill Gates talk at UW: In the last 30 years, data storage costs have fallen from $700/MB to $0.000002/MB. Have to re-think.

Video streaming on iPads are driving exponential growth in bandwidth usage by hotel guests. Hotels have been upgrading their Internet connections in recent years, but further upgrades may be in order.

From the New York Times:

[N]early two-thirds of business travelers say they have encountered slow Internet downloading in the last 12 months. Over two-thirds said they would “not return to a hotel where they had a poor technology experience,” iBAHN said. “The bits used for video streaming and downloading increased thirtyfold on our network in one year,” Mr. Garrison said.

(via iPads Change Economics, and Speed, of Hotel Wi-Fi - New York Times)

Google now shows your IP address when you search for “my ip”.

(via Google Operating System)