Brazil's National Health Care System

Brazil is an amazing country.  I would love to visit there some time to learn how they can be so forward thinking and progressive.  Here are some interesting statistics about Brazil and Health Care System:

• The Brazilian National Health Care System treats about 1.2 million inpatients and 100 million outpatients per month, providing everything from immunization to heart transplants.
• Complex, diverse computing systems that can effectively exchange huge amounts of patient data are a central requirement of a seamless health care system
• One of the main goals of the BNHCP was to avoid vendor lock-in or proprietary technology.  
• Two technologies -- Java technology and the XML data format -- were chosen to achieve this goal.  
• The nature of the project called for multiple vendors and system integrators to implement the system, and it was necessary to ease integration without hampering the different implementations.  
• XML, Java technology, and HTTP were used as the "glue" to bring these diverse implementations together relatively quickly.
  

Brazil and Java

• A Java application sent and received 25 million income tax filings in two months.  That was 100% of all income tax filings.  
• The main news organization stated that the number of submissions had surpassed all of their estimates, there were no problems reported, no last minute issues and they were “without words” in their analysis :-) 
• Java is the language that is used to control 100% of all external commerce of Brazil Java is used in all the government owned banks for the ATMs 
• A Java application manages the education system for all students in all public schools in Brazil.
• Java and the LWUIT (Light Weight UI Toolkit) will be the Brazilian Digital TV Standard.