Dana Blankenhorn, ZDNet Healthcare writer and blogger became an honorary Connectologist today with his short story on medical device connectivity. Dana lead with a consumer electronics comparison of plug and play printers that operate with personal computers.

When you buy a printer you expect to find a driver for it, one you
can easily install, which will allow ready communication between it and
your PC. You expect it to deal with files created by your PC, and you
expect your PC to deal with its files, too.

It took years for this to become routine, and replicating this ease-of-use is one of the great challenges open source still faces.

In the medical device market, however, this work has not even begun. In fact it has barely been imagined.

Ah, but it has been imagined - in mind numbing detail - by the feverish minds found reading this site. Dana refers to previous blog post on this site to make his point about the complexities and challenges of medical device connectivity.

He forthrightly states, “This is nothing less than a scandal. Common standards and interfaces
are needed to change this. The PC industry has lots of standards to
choose from, which interoperate. The medical market needs the same
thing.”