What will be the health care headlines of 2008?

Over at my other blog, I have been reviewing the year's most popular posts and making predictions for 2008.

Given how new this blog is, I lack the track record for the reviews, or the background for the predictions.

So I'd like to throw this over to you.

While it's easy to predict there will be no major changes to the U.S. health system in 2008 it's harder to predict exactly what will happen.

• What breakthroughs will change our lives?
• What trends will continue, and what trends will end?
• How far will we get in electronic health records next year?
• Will open source or open standards change the computing landscape in health care?
• What do we think is true today that will be proven false a year from now?
• Will health care retain its primacy as a public policy issue, or will it be replaced?

Many of the things I expect to see are continuations of trends that were well established this year. Automation, database computing, more consumer information, and more questioning of diagnoses seem certain.

So does real market penetration by Microsoft, although I can practically guarantee that silly name is going to be a casualty. The same with penetration by open source, from the equipment to central processing.

Those are easy guesses to make. What are your hard guesses?