OpenEMR: Electronic Medical Records and Medical Practice Management Software
I'm currently working on my thesis, I'm trying to design a radically different take on EMR/EHR systems - http://barnett.surge.sh/I've come to realize healthcare software is a significantly trickier problem than most realize. Not in terms of technical possiblity, but other factors.Building healthcare software is really hard - which seems like such a paradox, because surely ensuring highly trained individuals have half decent tools would be a huge goal for society - but almost all healthcare software is still frankly, terrible.After heaps of reading I've narrowed it down to 3 reasons why healthcare software is so hard to build.1 - Modern healthcare is complex, and varied. Building any healthcare softawre is no easy task, even simple systems have many other systems to integrate with. But what makes this worse, is that no two places do healthcare quite the same. Between regions, and institutions, healthcare can vary a shit ton.2 - Healthcare is risky. Sounds obvious, but if your software fails, people die - but this risk creates an attitude of "dont touch it". Changing systems has such a risk, that institutions will use the same software until it's so out of date its not funny. This impeeds improvement and innovation.3 - Healthcare software is hard to sell. Not in the sense that its unprofitable, but that it takes ages to get users. Say if I made video editing software - I could get professionals trying it out tommorrow. However, if I make a PMS, I have to sell it to the entire practice - not just a few keen doctors. From making contact to actually getting a small practice using your software could literally be years - making it super hard to enter the market.I've been working on this topic fulltime for a year now - and I must admit, I don't have the golden answer. However, I'm designing a system as a response to these factors, an alternative to interoperability, and would love to talk anybody in the industry about it.http://barnett.surge.sh/eliot.slevin@gmail.com