The Home Care Software Geek posts in this blog don't talk about Home Care Nursing Software, Private Duty Telephony, DME Delivery Software, Home Infusion Care Management or the other topics we focus on regularly at Ankota. Instead, these posts are intended to keep our readers up to date with technology trends that might be useful to your agencies, such as social media technologies, mobile devices, and what's happening from the big-boys like Microsoft, Google and Apple.

Back when I started my career, I worked for GE Aerospace (now part of Lockheed Martin) on software that flew and controlled satellites.  In my case the satellites circled the earth and we could send new commands to them from the ground for around 1 minute every two hours.  But still, it was a hard engineering problem and when we occaisionally had a failure in the communications or the instructions, the results were measured in big numbers (more than a large home care company makes in a year).  I've been out of the aerospace business for quite a long time now (note that I edited and removed the number of years because it made me feel old) but seeing the latest NASA achievement and what went into it gave me pause and prompted me to ask myself what I can learn from it as a home care software developer and what the home care industry can learn from it.

Before going much farther, I'd encourage you to watch this video to see what it required to get the Curiosity Mars Rover to its landing point on Mars.  For those of you who don't choose to watch the video, think of it this way:

The entire landing was done without human control 127 million miles away, and they were within 200 meters of their landing zone.  To put this in context it’s equivalent to throwing a dart, have it circle the earth 339 times, and then take a right turn by itself and hit a bull’s-eye!

So what can we learn from this?  Here are my thoughts:

• Seeing that this is possible inspires me to beleive that there are no home care software challenges that we can't achieve
• It further reminds me that when we have a tough problem to solve with our software, that there are tougher problems out there
• It inspires me to be more perfect with what we do
• But at the same time I'm proud that we can build software with much smaller teams and at a much lower cost in order to make it affordable for small businesses in the home care industry to afford it and benefit from it
• Lastly, and I guess that this one is a little bit strange, but sometimes I think about the sad tragedies that I hear about like September 11th and the recent Aurora Colorado tragedy and those things make me realize that my worst days are not really that bad.  It's fun for a change, to be inspired instead by something as awe inspiring as this accomplishment