Pfizer and its partners, however, see great potential. Ricci pointed to current healthcare-industry problems including prescriptions written for incompatible drugs, or delaying treatment by waiting for tests that that are unnecessary or that have already been performed. The hope, Ricci said, is that physicians will be able to file prescriptions from wireless devices on the fly, and check medical histories on online databases. IBM's healthcare efforts make up a multi-billion dollar global business. The newly created company will use Microsoft's .NET Enterprise Server Platform, Windows 2000 and wireless devices in developing products to allow doctors to manage clinical, financial, and administrative tasks, Pfizer said.
Doctors are some of the most technologically illiterate people out there.
If you look at medicine, it's way behind in movement into technology. So for IBM and Microsoft, it's a whole new market for them. Some analysts were skeptical, however, and cited WebMD's problems. This is a vision. Each company has difference business objectives and as soon as one of those objectives is compromised, you get infighting.