NxOpinion Mentioned in Steve Ballmer's Keynote at Tech·Ed 2004

The NxOpinion project I’ve been working on for the past year-and-a-half with Sagestone Consulting and the Robertson Research Institute was mentioned by Steve Ballmer in his keynote yesterday at Tech·Ed 2004 (see full transcript):

The last is perhaps to me the most satisfying. Robertson Research Institute is an organization dedicated to healthcare. Dr. Robertson had a very unfortunate death occur with a son of a friend of his. He took a look and said, why, what was wrong in the healthcare delivery process? The problem, it turned out, was it was very difficult to get enough information to doctors [in] real time so that they can absolutely make the right diagnosis.

So much healthcare information is locked up in so many different places in silos and they said, look, we're going to build a solution that really helps docs do a better job of diagnosing and solving patient problems. They're giving their solution away free to doctors as part of an emphasis to try to really do a better job and encourage people to do a better job of using information technology to solve healthcare issues. It's a very comprehensive tool. It was built in .NET.

They've found that because it's all for free, cost, complexity were very important. They cut their costs by about 90 percent, their development time by about 58 percent. They've got something like 35 to 40 percent as much code, so better solutions delivered more quickly, more maintainable and supportable in a very, very, very mission-critical environment, that environment being the doc trying to deliver real-time healthcare services.

It’s incredible to me how much support the NxOpinion project has received. Thank you to everyone who has helped (and continues to help) with this amazing endeavor.

Update: Apparently our NxOpinion case study video was also played just prior to the first keynote.