Mike D’s Blog

One of my favorite new sites is change.gov. It’s the website for President-Elect (soon to be just President) Obama. Whether you support(ed) Obama or not you have to respect a leader reaching out to the people to get ideas. As part of that outreach Obama’s team created the Citizen’s Briefing Book.

Basically you come up with an idea and you login and stick it in the book. Other people can then see your idea, comment on it, and vote it up or down. The top selections get put into a real book and delivered to Obama to act on. I think this type of thing should go on in every organization and company – not just with the President of the United States.

Anyhow, a co-worker of mine put in the idea to use virtualization to help move towards Green IT as the US moves to a centralized health records system. I think we can all agree this is a good idea.

The good news behind all of this is a lot of the federal government already uses VMware today. Heck, most companies in the health care industry and health care providers use VMware (or some form of virtualization) today as well. Pushing it further to help with the medical records system won’t be that hard.

This is actually a good transition into federated clouds. The government could build a cloud to house all of these medical records. That cloud could be distributed for redundancy and ease of access to the health care providers and insurance people that need access to the information or services it provides. By building a cloud strictly for medical records you could concentrate on compliance issues such as HIPAA.

So open your browser (if you’re in the US) and go vote up the idea to use virtualization for the planned digital health records system.