gordAndrews

When I was a young paper boy, the weekly paper I delivered cost my customers 30 cents per month. I got to keep 15 cents from each customer. It was a big deal when someone paid me with two quarters and told me to keep the rest. Almost every month while I waited for her 30 cents, one lonely widow would play solitaire with cards which had the spots almost completely worn off while she talked to me for what seemed like an eternity. She gave me all sorts of good advice, such as sign your name legibly. Usually she counted out her pennies and nickles for me from a black change purse with a snap on it, but sometimes she would give me a one dollar bill and expect her entire 70 cents back. I've been a changemaker ever since.

Any forest.

How structured information is stored and used......There is a better way to provide people with their own information in a form where they can share their information with those they wish to share it with. This could include their doctor, their family and friends, their community or in their daily work tasks. The present use of "silo" databases means that data must be structured for particular uses. This structuring must be done before the data can be collected or used. Bridges must be built between each of these islands of information. These bridges are expensive and time consuming to build and maintain. If the terrain at either end of the bridge changes, it likely requires a change to the bridge itself. As with the ubiquitous internet, I see "structured" information being universally available to anyone authroized to see it. By packaging information in a common form, it can be created, read, filtered, searched, tallied and otherwise used by a few common programs. This is equivalent of using an internet browser (there are maybe less than 20 in common use now) to access everything on both the internet and increasingly, on your own computer. Applications for this are unlimited, but will include health care records, where every symptom and observation and medication and accident and significant event in a person's life can be recorded in a common way and called up selectively whenever needed. I'm speaking of reducing information granularity down to the smallest useful size. Take your pill and an event is recorded, and possibly transmitted to your caregiver who is watching that you take your medicine as perscribed. In another case, if you are tested positive for a flu, the latitude and longitude of the clinic where you were tested, your home and your work place can be recorded and anonymously provided instantaneously to epidemeologists. This all requires us to put an end to the legacy of the 80 column punched card once and for all. The present use of relational databases by hospitals, governments and business does not enable the free exchange of structured data without huge cost in software development money and time. This will result in an information sea change, similar in scope to the introduction of the successful internet candidate, the www which uses standards such as html and http.

40 years (yes four zero) in the IT business, starting with 80 column punched cards (see above). Many industries, including health care, using many technologies.