Microsoft and Health Care Software

Writing in the Wall St. Journal on October 7, 2007, Bill Gates rightly points out the significant deficiencies with the state of health care informatics and its adverse effect on the quality of patient care. What might a company like Microsoft offer to this field? I submit that Microsoft is exactly what we need to make some sense out of the mess we face in health care informatics. We need a common software product that is as ubiquitous as Word or PowerPoint. We need someone with deep pockets like Microsoft to make the initial investment, to implement standards that have been agreed upon such as HL7, and to introduce some meaningful competition into a field that needs more of a driving sense of the importance and urgent need for innovation. Microsoft has been criticized by many for lacking a spirit of innovation in its flagship products, Windows and Office, but the truth is that they work as expected for most users, and it would be difficult to imagine how global businesses could function without them. If only the same could be said of health care software. Microsoft's entry to this field is to be welcomed.