Chrome OS for healthcare? At least someone thinks so

Medgadget: “Yet on the whole, playing with the CR-48 is like peeking into the future – the far, far away future. And though it’s hard to fill in all the details now, there’s a lot of potential for Chrome OS in the world of medicine.” – The author does a great job of covering why the Chrome OS, and a CR-48 like device, would be good for healthcare. Reasons include disposability in which “the ultimate machine for the medical world is the one in which the doctor, nurse, patient, etc, cares the least about if it’s dropped, lost, or broken”; interchangeability by allowing any user to simply log into any CR-48 and have their information instantly available; security; and hardware customizability. It’s a refreshing change to see someone thinking outside the box when it comes to computing in healthcare.

I’m a proponent of both mobile computing and the cloud, and I think the author of the article finds the right combination of words and logic to articulate why the cloud will provide the platform of the future for healthcare. This is especially true as healthcare continues to attempt to develop integrated solutions and shared databases. “Health IT evangelists often imagine a world where data standards and anonymous sharing enable a whole new level of medical analytics. With pooled health data new hypotheses might be tested that previously would have required expensive observational trials. Drugs with harmful side-effects would be more easily identified and new treatment protocols could be written. The sort of sharing necessary for these robust analytics is made much more difficult when patient data is on local machines, either on a doctor’s computer, or a hospital’s servers. The adoption of Chrome OS has the potential to catalyze the move to the cloud, and thus this holy grail of medical analytics.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Below are two videos. The first shows a short run through of the Chrome OS on the CR-48 by Medgadget. The second is an awesome video showing some inventive ways to destroy your CR-48 notebook. Of Course the entire exercise is designed to demonstrate the benefits of using cloud computing to preserve your precious data regardless of how your CR-48 meets its demise.