Friday, January 11, 2008

Java and the Brazilian Healthcare System

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous blog entry about the Sun Tech Days in Atlanta was the Q and A session with James Gosling. One of the questions was: In his opinion what is the most impressive/interesting Java application he came across and James started talking about the Brazilian Healthcare system, which is running a Java based platform.

Following James, all you need in Brazil is a healthcare card. The whole system is paperless. For example if your doctor gives you a prescription you still only need your healthcare care when showing up at the pharmacy. When going to a different doctor, (s)he just looks up your records in the system.

The system also handles some interesting requirements: names and addresses are optional. For example there are people living the in Amazon forest with changing locations. Also, there are indigenous people that consider a person’s name personal and thus won’t share it with their doctors.

Some quick searching using Google produced the following interesting looking links:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/Brasilian-Healthcare-System

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/xml/brazil/

I may spend some time over the weekend reading those articles. Maybe we can implement a similar system in the US???

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