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Microsoft Medicine

Microsoft Unveils New Vaccine Tools to Address Earlier Failures (bloomberg.com) 43

Microsoft unveiled new technology to boost government and health care organizations' vaccine management systems, including scheduling shot appointments and monitoring results, to fix shortcomings weeks after the company's initial custom-built programs ran aground in a few states. From a report: The Microsoft Vaccine Management product released Friday is made up of features and new apps that the software company said will improve upon and fix the glitches that occurred when its previous effort, the Vaccination Registration and Application System, failed to work properly in New Jersey and Washington D.C. The new software "incorporates lessons learned from VRAS regarding scalable architecture, improved user experiences for residents and health care workers," the company said in an email. It also uses health care standards for information transfer so data can be exported more quickly to other record systems, such as electronic medical records. The software also addresses other issues that hampered the previous option, including requiring users to pre-register before seeking a Covid-19 vaccine appointment and providing a way to proactively handle spikes in demand.
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Microsoft Unveils New Vaccine Tools to Address Earlier Failures

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  • by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh&gmail,com> on Friday March 19, 2021 @12:43PM (#61176086) Journal

    Always wait for Service Pack 1, that's when it's stable!

  • The last thing the world needs is more Microsoft software.
    • Being that most healthcare handles this data on Spreadsheets, or in a custom made Access DB or VB Program. It is really a step up.

      • The $3B annual revenue reporting from Epic Systems would disagree, depending on your definition and scope of "most healthcare".

  • by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh&gmail,com> on Friday March 19, 2021 @12:49PM (#61176114) Journal

    How long until the world is vaccinated? it's 1 year...oh wait, it's 2 months....10 years...3 weeks?

    • by spun ( 1352 )

      We're going to hit Biden's target 100 million vaccinated Americans 42 days early. So just 58 days to vaccinate 100 million people, or about 1/3 of the population. That's how real leadership works. Nice to have adults running the show again, isn't it? Yeah, you love acknowledging that the Democrats do it better, faster, cheaper, and with less hatred and violence, don't you? Doesn't it make you feel proud to be an American again? I know it makes me feel that way. Feels like... winning. Just holding the enemy

      • As much as I like Biden, I wouldn't declare "Mission Accomplished" until it is done.
        There is a lot of work to do, and the current sets were the "Easy Group" of people to get Vaccinated. Medical Workers who know how the Vaccine works and/or trusts from experience the people who tells them that it is safe. In my state, the current group are the people who are at highest risk for medical complications from catching COVID. So this group has their own self interest in mind getting vaccinated.

        The groups after th

        • Eventually we will reach a point where everyone who wants a vaccine will have one (and it may require ongoing boosters for quite some time so long as there are enough infected people in other parts of the world to keep spawning variants).

          After that, there will be two other groups left - people who can't be vaccinated, and people who don't want to be vaccinated. At that point, we will have to learn to do as we do now with so many other preventable diseases including the flu. Protect people who can't be
        • by spun ( 1352 )

          I didn't declare anything except "So far, so much better than Trump." And frankly, the idiots make up less than 20% of the total US population, so we can get to herd immunity levels without them. If some of them die because of their stupidity, that's a price I'm willing to pay.

          • I have to be fare, and point out that the Vaccines didn't come out until after the election. And during the time it took for these companies to ramp up production, Biden became president.
            So we can't really say Biden is managing the Vaccines better than Trump, because he didn't have much time to really do anything about it.

            Sure I personally wouldn't expect Trump to be able to handle it, with his track record of caring about the American Public or America especially those who don't like him, and he spend afte

            • by spun ( 1352 )

              He could have had a plan in place. If he was expecting to be re-elected, he should have had a plan in place, yes? He didn't. Because he doesn't actually lead, he just plays golf and makes bitchy tweets from the shitter. Without daddy's money, and the Russian funding he receives for laundering their money, he would be a bum on the street. He thinks leadership is just being shouty and firing people. There's a leeeetle bit more to it than that. No big fan of Biden, he's too corporate, but at least he understan

              • he should have had a plan in place, yes? He didn't.

                Then where did these numbers come from? The vaccine fairy?
                • by spun ( 1352 )

                  What numbers? I'm not psychic, you actually have to provide some sort of context.

                  • "the U.S. was already roughly vaccinating roughly 1 million Americans a day under former President Trump when Mr. Biden took office" according to CBS News' web site. And no, so far as I know CBS news is (and was) not particularly pro-Trump.

                    BTW, I tried to provide a link, but /. said "Filter error: Looks like ascii art." So sorry, I guess you can do a web search for the quote.

  • What most organizations and software vendors tend to do is under estimate the complexity needed for proper management of medical appointments. While it seems easy at first it becomes very complex as the details on what is needed is weeded out.

    It is much more closer to task process management, in your OS, however the ability to reorganize your tasks from its initial spot is nearly impossible.
    You get Appointment Fragmentation, Say you have a 1 Hour New Visit and 15 minute follow up visits available at the s

    • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

      Indeed, but if this is for booking appointments for a COVID vaccine then the appointments are *VERY* standardised as are followup appointments.

  • We've vaccinated over 1/3 the country [ourworldindata.org]. Deaths from Covid (used as a quick measure for all facets of the disease) (final chart on this page [worldometers.info]) has fallen off a cliff. With an unknown proportion of the country having already had the virus, the R value of Covid is clearly less than 1. Much less than 1.

    We're leaving winter, and people will be getting more vitamin D. Roughly speaking, vitamin D from sunlight goes to zero Nov through Feb.

    Closing things such as indoor or outdoor dining is not based on any science. S

    • by Improv ( 2467 )

      Follow the guidance from the epidemiologists. It's not easy for anyone, but the deaths from Covid still outweigh the other issues you raise. Vaccines are beginning to change the numbers, and provided the UK variant isn't too much of a wrench in the works, we're hopefully not too far from starting to return to normal. Hold tight.

      • Follow the guidance from the epidemiologists. It's not easy for anyone, but the deaths from Covid still outweigh the other issues you raise. Vaccines are beginning to change the numbers, and provided the UK variant isn't too much of a wrench in the works, we're hopefully not too far from starting to return to normal. Hold tight.

        Epidemiologists are not economists, and this is a multi-dimensional problem. Why are we considering *only* the epidemiological advice?

        Looking at a multi-dimensional issue in one dimension is not the optimal strategy. Balance is required: we need to balance the plusses and minuses of the medical issues with the plusses and minuses of the economic ones.

        An example from economics: do you invest in the one company whose stock you think will go up the most? Or do you apportion the "weight" of your investment to d

        • by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Friday March 19, 2021 @02:24PM (#61176512) Homepage

          If we were only thinking of economics, the US would have shut down nearly everything for 2 full weeks in March of last year. It would have bought us a huge amount of time before infection rates ramped back up and masks alone would be sufficient to have nearly everything back to normal in the meantime.

          Having things half-open/half-closed is not a compromise - it's the worst of both worlds.

          The real argument is whether our Constitution leaves much of a legal framework to make that actually happen.

          • by Improv ( 2467 )

            Our Constitution permits the response we've taken to the pandemic, as it has past epidemics. We made the right choice then, and we're still making it. Chill out, hold on, and we'll get through this.

    • Is it really closed?

      I live in one of those LiBeRaL states with one of those hard noes politicians who did a lot of drastic and possibly considered over reaching executive actions to keep the state safe. However even at first only a few places were considered closed, then they were reopened about 6-8 months ago. Just as long as they follow new guidelines. Some of these places never re-opened or closed shortly after opening because management was just too stubborn to make the required changes, thus were forc

    • NO, we have not vaccinated > 1/3 of the US; we've provided over 100M doses, but many of those were the required second dose. As of 12 March (a week ago), the number of people who have received *both* doses is 13% (a little over 1/8 of the population), according to https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/1... [cnbc.com], and a bit under twice that have received at least one dose.

      The proportion of people over 65 who have been fully vaccinated reached almost 1/3, and the proportion of the over 65 who have gotten at least one do

  • They wrote a software that wouldn't scale with an expected demand of 250+ million users in the US, where a large percentage of those users would be submitting many queries in an attempt to secure vaccination appointments in their surrounding area. And it couldn't export data in a format that other medical records systems can easily import?

    Gee, I can't imagine why their first swing was a complete failure. Sounds like they have a product team problem - namely, they completely misunderstood the product that

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