“When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
This old saying is continually relevant in the world of evolving technologies, and something we need to be constantly aware of when planning how to apply technology for private, community, statewide, and national HIEs.
For example, cloud computing is one of those great ideas whose underlying concept has proven successful for decades. The model has evolved from shared computing in the 70s and 80s (e.g., Shared Medical Systems) to Application Service Providers (ASP) in the 90s and now is referred to as cloud computing in the 21st century, but it is basically the same idea of sharing resources and applications to improve price, performance, and resource requirements. Of course, with each generation, improvements in the underlying technology are made, such as the use of service-oriented architectures to enable cloud computing to offer a high degree of modularity and flexibility.”
Article
Robert Connely, The HIE Blog, 4 November 2009
