Microsoft Office and Healthcare

The Healthcare IT Blog over at Microsoft is reporting about a number of new Reference Implementations for MS Office specific for health care. These are collections of templates and sample code that integrate all parts of MS Office to solve business problems. For example, you can use Word, Infopath, BizTalk, and Sharepoint to manage your clinical forms.
Solutions are also available for download for Care Management, Clinical Trials, and Clinical Systems. See the original source for more links.

It's nice to see Microsoft moving Office to a serious platform as opposed to just a bunch of standalone apps. I definitely like the direction they're going with it. They really are playing in a different space than just Word processing and document management. Now I understand why they aren't too concerned about OpenOffice 2.0.

My only hope is that they really do adopt the Open Document Format in Office 12. Having my health care records in a proprietary format doesn't jive well with me.