Windows Media Center for eHealth

Dr. Clifford Goldsmith, Director of the Provider Industry group in Microsoft’s Healthcare and Life Sciences unit, had some great ideas in his recent Windows Media Center (MCE) for eHealth article.

As a regular user of MCE I totally agree with him that it’s a good platform for communicating with patients within the home. MCE is not that prevalent yet, but perhaps with the right “killer healthcare IT app” it could make some inroads for elderly or chronically ill patients. With a proper platform in place (especially one that can be run with a remote control), new software ideas could foster. I’ve worked with some retirement communities and they would seem to be a perfect candidate for MCE devices. Now, if we can marry the work that ADT is doing from a data center perspective with a platform like MCE it would be a great solution as a platform for developers like us. We could then worry about the software and not the hardware or network.

Tivo (which is based on Linux) and other similar DVRs from cable companies could also play in the mix but I think with Microsoft’s solid background in health IT and a good parter community they can probably make the solutions work better.

Dr. Goldsmith’s idea has merit. Ok, sure, he’s working for Microsoft and espousing a Microsoft product as a solution. But, that doesn’t mean it won’t work. 🙂