It's not being "disrupted" because it's extremely capital intensive to enter this market. The requirements seem intractable:
- Structured data with very high level of granularity.
- Patients often don't fit the mold exactly. It's hard to classify something that is going on with a patient; there are 68,000 ICD-10 codes.
- Data needs to be interoperable with existing and competing systems.
- Every hospital has their processes and documentation practices. As a result, most electronic record software is highly customizable, and a company representative is usually on call or on site to continuously customize it.
- Software needs extreme backwards compatibility. You need to be able to read records that are tens of years old.
- Need to be able to print everything.
- Need to meet regulatory requirements and security audits. Regulatory requirements vary by state and country.
- Healthcare institutions are inherently conservative with their technology, and for likely good reason. Plus they don't upgrade equipment very often. If they just spent $1 billion upgrading their entire IT infrastructure, they're not going to consider your startup's solutions for awhile.
- Patients don't like it when their provider is focused on a computer or taking notes instead of on them.
- Different UI for each provider (e.g., primary care physician vs. pharmacist vs. radiologist)
- Need to communicate with a wide variety of medical hardware that doesn't have good standard protocols, and much of which is very old.
And on and on...