Doctors In Norway Still Using Floppy Disks

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It's hard to imagine anyone, let alone a doctor, in this day and age still using floppy disks but that is exactly what is happening in Norway. :eek:

Norwegian doctors get one 3.5″ floppy in the mail from the government (the Norwegian Directorate of Health) every month. For a long time this applied to all of them, but for about the last decade a secure electronic option has been available. Problem is, a lot of doctors love their MSDOS-based electronic journals and haven’t switched yet.
 
Floppies? They're still light years ahead of the Veteran's Healtha Admin here in the USA still warehousing stacks of paper.
 
I thought they had drugs for that now ... do people still suffer from floppy disks ... I know I have seen the commercials (if you have a file transfer that lasts longer than 4 hours please contact your IT manager) :D
 
What's the difference between a woman and a PC?
A woman wont take a 31/2 inch floppy.

Boom ching!
 
Wake up and smell the healthcare. There are still hospitals in America that use runners because some of the DOS based programs they use do not interface with modern browsers. Healthcare in the U.S. has the worst computing infrastructure in IT bar none. The hospitality industry is a distant second.
 
Doogie-Howser_screen.jpg
 
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Some people just get into a groove with their workflow, at some point eventually they will all need to switch over to the online system though.
 
Health care is full of old tech in general. Faxing is still very much a thing too.

The bad thing, is DOS text mode apps are really fast and efficient once you learned them. I actually kinda miss that entire genre routinely as I launch some big bloated UI disaster that consumes megabytes, is slow to respond, and doesn't actually do anything complicated.

Oh dear, I've become the Get Off My Lawn Guy.
 
A lot of doctors don't like change and getting them to adopt technology is damn near difficult.

My doctor added his first computer this year only because the ACA mandated they have one. Up until then they did everything with paper - from scheduling to charts and referrals.
 
A lot of doctors don't like change and getting them to adopt technology is damn near difficult.

My doctor added his first computer this year only because the ACA mandated they have one. Up until then they did everything with paper - from scheduling to charts and referrals.

Also, for those wondering. Prior to the computer the wait time WITH an appointment was 2hours average. Now, it's 15 minutes. They seem more efficient in their day to day operations. Imagine that.
 
Wake up and smell the healthcare. There are still hospitals in America that use runners because some of the DOS based programs they use do not interface with modern browsers. Healthcare in the U.S. has the worst computing infrastructure in IT bar none. The hospitality industry is a distant second.

Lol. Had a project for a doctor's office, 2008 timeframe. They were using Atari 800s and 5-1/4s and wanted to move to WinXP PCs. It was an...interesting...data migration. I had to dig up an IBM AT to make it easier. Fun to fire up that old machine after 10+ years (at the time).

I know Big Healthcare still has ancient Unix/DOS/AS400 systems backboning so much of what they do. It's just really hard to clean slate something in continuous usage.
 
Wake up and smell the healthcare. There are still hospitals in America that use runners because some of the DOS based programs they use do not interface with modern browsers.

And does it get hacked by external parties????
 
Where do they get their floppies from? Didnt they stop making them years ago?
 
Being doctors and all, with all those floppy disks, why don't they just prescribe themselves Cialis?
 
I'm working on Airbus A330 airplanes that require database installation that spans 3 to 10 floppy diskettes per software
 
Hospitals tend to be behind with tech. When I worked there not that long ago they had an xray machine that saved to floppy. They'd occasionally come to us hoping we can recover data off one that got corrupted. :p

There was plenty of NT4 stuff there too, even a Sco Unix box, running critical systems. The company that made the software for these systems no longer existed so there was no way to upgrade without completely switching platforms and having to rebuild everything from scratch.
 
Where do they get their floppies from? Didnt they stop making them years ago?

If you need some, I still have several hundred sitting in a box in my closet :)

I did dump the box of 5 1/4 floppies ( a couple hundred) a few years ago, and I really should get rid of these old zip drives I have sitting on my desk.

At least they are not using 8" floppies any more :)

Anyone need a 5 1/4 full height 600MB scsi drive? Low mileage, only 2 owners. Used to sell for around $1,000 when new.

Maybe I need to start a computer museum, or maybe a computer dump :)
 
Health care is full of old tech in general. Faxing is still very much a thing too.

a lot of that is because of HIPPA... doing things online requires all sorts of compliance and encryption blah blah... or you could just fax it... a lot of medical imaging systems you go online, request a document and the system faxes it to you... stupid as hell but it's an easy way to comply

as far as "usefulness" of old stuff... if it does what you need it to what is the problem? hell the game of thrones guy uses Word Star for DOS

I fired up my ancient Power Mac over the weekend to play Sim City 2000... was great :)
 
I was messing around with my old PS/2 (286, and one meg of RAM). And honestly, asides from the fact that I couldn't print any documents, or surf the web - I still got the same amount of work done on that old machine than any of my modern machines.

I was pleasantly surprised that my productivity levels didn't plummet. And dare I say - on some things, productivity was increased! That's due to no internet to distract me. :)
 
But wait I thought all of those liberal progressive socialist countries were so so advanced?
 
Wake up and smell the healthcare. There are still hospitals in America that use runners because some of the DOS based programs they use do not interface with modern browsers. Healthcare in the U.S. has the worst computing infrastructure in IT bar none. The hospitality industry is a distant second.

Healthcare software is disastrously expensive. To the tune of millions and billions of dollars. Mostly because of so many government regulations and bureaucracies and rules that you have to comply with. My father's hospital spent hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading software to be "ICD-10" compliant. ICD-10 is the newest ridiculous government mandate dictating billing codes and there is all kind of nonsense like a billing code for drowning due to jet skis on fire (http://www.icdvalidator.com/Medical_Data/ICD10/DiagnosisV9027XA.html).

Text-based interfaces are more efficient for data entry and retrieval anyways. About the only advantage GUIs have is that mental midgets have an easier time learning to use them. But once you learn a text interface, there is simply no comparison (compare some of the old WordPerfect/reveal code power users).
 
But wait I thought all of those liberal progressive socialist countries were so so advanced?

I'm guessing they thought about replacing machines which still worked fine for their purpose and decided to put that money towards actual health care.

But yes, Kaiser will reject my cortisone shots on very new machines, so we've got them there! SUCK IT NORWAY!
 
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