- The Karate Kid was #1 at the boxoffice last weekend with The A-Team coming in a distant second. My family and I took in The Karate Kid earlier this week. It wasn’t bad. Not great, but not bad. We plan on seeing The A-Team tomorrow. I loved that show when I was younger.

- For anyone that really cares, the Lakers won the NBA finals. All I can say is thank goodness basketball season is finally over. All that means to me is that football is right around the corner. Now if I can only make MLB go away forever things would be good.

- My family and I spent a few days in Oregon recently to attend my nieces graduation from Oregon State University (OSU), home of the Beavers. Besides the constant bombardment with Halloween colors, it’s a beautiful campus. Not quite as picturesque as UGA, but definitely nice. I took the opportunity to stop by the school of pharmacy, which turned out to be a single building near the library. I miss being on a college campus. However, I don’t miss it enough to go back to school.

- Following the trip to Oregon I am thankful for the Verizon network, the GPS on my DROID and MP3 players. Without these things I may have never made it home.

- I took hundreds of photos during our trip to Oregon. I posted a few of them here if you’re interested.

- John Poikonen posted a very interesting graphical representation of pharmacy informatics at RxInformatics.com. I’ll have to get John to explain it to me because the whole thing went right over my head.

- Check out this video from iLink Systems using Microsoft Surface in conjunction with Microsoft HealthVault and Microsoft Amalga. Amazing! This is what healthcare should look like with the patient and physician interacting side by side with all information available at their fingertips in an easy to use framework.

- The Android market is heating up. Verizon has information on the new DROID X, which is very exciting. There are some great pictures and video at Engadget if you’re interested.

- Technologizer: “I see only one possibility here: HP’s Windows slate PC is dead. Doesn’t mean that there won’t be some sort of Windows-powered HP tablet someday, but this one isn’t happening.” <sigh> Looks like another great tablet device will never see the light of day. I can’t believe what’s going on in the tablet market at this point in history. None of it is good.

- Engadget has created a Dell Streak hub where one can find all the information you would ever want on this slick little device. I’m really looking forward to the Streak hitting the US market. No question about it, the Streak is on my wish list.

- Here’s some science I can sink my teeth into; sorry had to do it. “Potato Chip Science turns empty chip bags, tubes, and lids—plus spuds and chips—into a whole brain grab bag of experimental fun.”

- Microsoft Office 2010 is here. I’ve been using the Office 2010 beta for a while now and have been impressed by the features, especially on the tablet.

- In addition to the Office 2010 rollout, Microsoft is now offering their office suite as part of Windows Live in conjunction with Skydrive. For those of you that don’t know what this is I highly recommend you check it out. It’s basically a stripped-down version of Microsoft Office for the desktop, but still plenty robust enough for your day-to-day needs. In addition, the Microsoft Skydrive offers 25GB of free storage in the Microsoft cloud. And all for free. I’ve heard rumors that Microsoft has plans to decrease the storage to 2GB, but I’m really hoping they don’t do that. The 25GB of storage is what separates them from the rest of the players in this area. Walt Mossberg has a quick and dirty review of the new Microsoft Office for the web, including a video that I’ve placed below.

- I’ve also been using Windows Live Sync. It’s functional, but there’s a lot of room for improvement. Live Sync has a long way to go to catch up with the likes of applications like Dropbox. Why didn’t Microsoft build its Office Live and Skydrive on top of its Live Mesh platform? That would seem to make a lot more sense. I’m just sayin’.

- NewTeeVee: “Up until now, if YouTube users wanted to combine multiple clips into a single video, they had to use offline editing tools. But YouTube today rolled out cloud-based video editing tools, giving users a whole new way to remix their existing video assets online.” – I’m a relative newcomer to the age of YouTube videos, but have been doing a little experimentation over the past several months. This is exciting news indeed.

- Barcode.com: “Interestingly enough, the first retail application for barcodes was developed for the grocery industry in the l960’s and is now present in all types of retail businesses.  Although we seldom give it a second thought, the barcode has completely revolutionized retail.” - The article goes on to give some reasons to support the statement above. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we’re twenty years behind the consumer industry when it comes to making good use of technology. Will we ever catch up? Who knows.

- I found this over at 9 to 5 Mac. Sad and funny all at the same time.

- I continue to be impressed with Google Buzz. The ability to go beyond 140 characters, add comments, photos, video, etc, and carry on a conversation is promising. It really is a cross between Google Wave, GMail and Twitter. I’m not sure exactly where it fits in the whole scheme of things, but I find it interesting.

-  There is a an article at the For The Record website that offers an interesting perspective of healthcare technology. What’s most interesting is that the article is over a year old and is still relevant. “The [healthcare] industry has historically placed a high priority on improving patient safety and reducing preventable errors. The introduction of technology into the mix has not altered that focus, although it has added new layers of complexity.” Yep, it’s like playing Jenga. Healthcare continues to build these complex towers of technology without creating a solid foundation. And we all know how a Jenga games end.

Father’s day is Sunday. Just in case you don’t know, it’s good to be a dad. Have a great weekend everyone.

Then I noticed a trend at a lot of the web sites that I frequent: Microsoft has slowly, and quietly, been positioning itself to jump into the healthcare market.

Consider the following:

• Microsoft has been plowing forward with their cloud and Software-as-a-Service model: Azure Platform, Office Live, etc.
• Microsoft is offering American scientific researchers free access to their new Window’s Azure platform. This should allow centralized data collection for scientists to collaborate on research projects.
• HealthVault is one of the key players in the personal healthcare record (PHR) race. Google Health is the other big boy on the block. Sure, there are other players in the game, but even they recognize the need to acknowledge the dominance of Microsoft and Google.
• Microsoft announced HealthVault Community Connect, which is designed to help hospitals and patients control the flow of data stored in multiple systems.
• The Cleveland Clinic and Microsoft partnered to use HealthVault with the hospitals EMR to track patients with chronic conditions.
• EHR vendors are starting to get on board with the Microsoft platform.
• Microsoft already offers a health information system, i.e. Amalga Hospital Information System. Why isn’t anyone talking about it?
• Take a look at some of Microsoft’s activity at HIMSS 10.
• Microsoft Surface – what a great tool for physician interaction with patients.

• Mobility – at the moment, the only real player in the tablet computer game is Microsoft. I’m encouraged by the iPad and the Adam, but for now there is only Microsoft and Windows XP tablet, Vista and Windows 7. Microsoft will have to do a better job with their smartphone platform, but take notice that they continue to push forward with the concept even though they’re getting trounced by the iPhone and Android devices.
• Microsoft and Philips are collaborating to build clinical decision support tools (CDST).
• Microsoft is already entrenched in numerous healthcare systems across the country, perhaps the world, as an enterprise partner. Windows is still the dominant operating system found on desktop computers in hospitals, and how many millions of healthcare providers already use a Microsoft productivity application, i.e. MS Office, Exchange Server, MS Outlook, MS SQL Server, so on and so forth. This gives Microsoft an extensive user base from which to build an incredibly integrated system.

Further consider that software like our pharmacy information system (PhIS) and BCMA system from Siemens is built on the .NET framework using Visual Basic.NET. Yep, another Microsoft product. How long do you think it will be before other vendors begin partnering with Microsoft to develop and integrate products that will work in the healthcare arena? I’m betting not long.

I’d love to spend a few days in Redmond running around playing with all their toys. I can’t imagine the research and development that goes on behind those walls, but it must be pretty cool. I’m sure we only see a fraction of what they’re working on.

Microsoft may be aging and their bite may not be as vicious as it used to be, but they are still an 800 pound gorilla in the the software industry. And what can an 800 pound gorilla do? You got it, anything it wants.