I usually don’t bother picking on other people’s editorials. But this one, from FierceHealth IT (which I usually like, incidentally – it’s a nice roundup of daily HIT stories) just struck me as trying to fill space:
Google’s Chrome OS may heat up PHR competition with Microsoft – FierceHealthIT.
Google’s Chrome OS has nothing to do with healthcare. This is not a signal of the shift to cloud computing – that signal flare went up several years ago. Google won’t “tightly couple” Google Health to Chrome OS. HealthVault is just as web based and interactive as Google Health (admittedly, a little more complex to use, but you get more out of it). Both systems have all kinds of big, enterprise-class integrations behind them. Chrome OS is about Netbooks – they’ll ship a few million units on cheap hardware, and it will be easier for us to sit in front of the TV at night checking email. I won’t say it will never be a competitive desktop operating system, but that would be many years and several paradigm shifts down the road. A new version of Google Calendar would be more significant – at least you could integrate that with appointment reminders somehow.
The last sentence kind of sums it up:
I don’t pretend to have any kind of crystal ball here. But I do think it’s hard to argue that the PHR world is a lot more interesting with the Chrome OS in it.
That’s verbatim. And I agree – it is VERY hard to argue the proposition that Chrome OS makes any kind of difference whatsoever.
Android, by the way, is a different story – while it’s also too early to say, Google’s OTHER OS project, intended at the moment for cell phones, could enable a range of interesting healthcare applications. Since it doesn’t require always-on connectivity, Android could form the base of a handheld computing ecosystem in healthcare. Apple’s iPhone OS could do the same thing, and if Apple brings out a tablet, as they’re now expected to, I’d look for a wave of innovation coming off that platform. Local storage coupled with intuitive interfaces and great performance? That matters.