The UK’s Register had an interesting white paper advertised as “University Hospitals Bristol gain real-time view of bed availability”. As healthcare is one of the next IT wastelands that could really benefit from event processing (think real-time medical monitoring, patient track and trace, specialist resource real-time optimization, etc), I was disappointed to find this was an advertorial for… Sharepoint! It’s a bit like TIBCO claiming its Portal product provides the smarts for a real-time dashboard, rather than just being the container for such displays. One hopes that UH Bristol is doing a bit more than just having some web part polling some database with “end-of-day” ward bed reports and then relying on doctors telephone the wards to try and book any available beds…
[For non-UK readers, UK hospitals are usually managed under the National Health Service: like any government body, it is widely considered as heavy on bureaucracy and light on “customer focus”, with a common budget-saving mechanism of closing patient wards leading to situations where hospital beds are scarce resources.]
