Palm Pilot and the challenges of interoperability

Take a look here at John Faughn's Slashdot comment on the future of Palm as an indicator of the "complexity of integration" in health care. (The comment is repeated here at Faughn's own site.)

I've used a Palm Pilot for a number of years now and I use the Palm Desktop on my PC to synchronize with the handheld. It's pretty straightforward while working in isolation.

However ...

When I last worked for another company, they used Microsoft Outlook and Exchange and were pretty insistent that certain staff people publish their schedules openly so that others could know where they were and where there were schedule openings. But they did not buy PDAs for staff so we chose and purchased our own.

Synchronizing the Palm with Outlook was a horror. The process lost data or it duplicated data (imagine having to delete, one-by-one, 2,000 duplicate contacts on both the PC and the handheld). Ultimately, I printed my schedule and made copies. Pretty stupid for an IT company, right?

Now this process is dealing with relatively simple data: a contact list, calendar, task list, and notes and relatively simple processes, synchronize one device with another. Right?

Now let's step up to medical records embedded in multiple process organizations and processes. Ohhhh. Maybe that's why things are so slow. Vastly more complex data embedded in multiple vastly more complex processes.

So the next time I'm frustrated with the pace of integration, I'll open up my Palm.