Doctors ask engineers to spend more time in the hospital before building apps
I am biased, but I spent almost half a decade building&#x2F;designing systems for Healthcare. I had direct interaction with the users, the vendors and the actual go-live planning for a number of facilities.<p>Healthcare has a lot of issues, EPIC was a stone-walling garden, Siemens wanted to steal stuff, OpenVista was a non starter, Philips talked a big talk but never followed through, Not everyone was truly HL7 compliant, Users didnt believe on Apps on the iphone&#x2F;ipod-touch as the screens were too small and the average age of users was ~57, The number of employees in a large hospital is in the thousands, Patient Entertainment systems were snake-oil-jokes, &quot;medical grade&quot; devices were a fraud, and selling into them at this time was a unique process for every hospital -- and while the users (clinical staff) really really want to (and do) provide good care, training 1,000+ Staff&#x2F;Nurses on your new tech is very daunting.<p>Obviously we have made a ton of progress in tech in healthcare, but finding a way to consume more time with staff&#x2F;processes can be a difficult problem to figure out access.<p>Silicon valley needs an actual research hospital for tech - if I were throwing my billionaire last name on SFGH&#x2F;UCSF&#x2F;Oakland etc&#x27;s hospitals - I&#x27;d do a lot more than just buying the name of the building - seeking how to work together to make an SV research hospital happen in an innovative way.<p>(We had a fully integrated HL7 iphone app which could interact with OpenVista, and other systems like Vocera and Philips and Siemens systems. We had a channel to work with hospitals around here but the screen size and costs of providing handhelds to nurses were too high for 2007. YC Turned us down, Epic and Cerner would allow integrations... We opensourced it to Openvista.)