Epic Tells Customers It Will Stop Google Cloud Integrations
Google is absolutely doing the right thing. Anything that can be done to enhance the efficacy of EMR software will help lead to better patient outcomes. As far as I can tell, Google is approaching the problem foremost from the perspective of "how can we make people healthier by making software more effective." Epic and Cerner are simply not doing that. Somewhere in the comments here someone mentioned that most EMR software is a billing system with record keeping attached. Although implementations vary between hospitals, the software is always purchased by administrators, typically with little input from doctors.<p>In most implementations, neither Cerner not Epic encourage structured data recording except for billing codes. This means that if a patient comes through the medical system frequently, doctors have to read pages and pages of unstructured text to get a sense of what's going on for the patient. The software is designed to be sold to administrators and, as currently designed is unquestionably leading to worse outcomes for patients.<p>Google has made a lot of mistakes. If they build something doctors truly want to use and that helps properly organize information, however, and if Google doesn't misuse the data/people aren't unreasonably paranoid about data misuse, it will be a godsend for the industry and it will save lives.<p>We haven't even begun to talk about the potential for machine learning and statistics to understand what treatments are most effective if data are structured properly. This is unquestionably an interesting and unique case where collecting massive amounts of data and handing in to a trusted, competent, creative, research-oriented authority could have incredible benefit for mankind. I don't trust Cerner or Epic with this mission for a second.