Comment by snomad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snomad | Hacker News Reader

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As the MOOCs found out, you can't just "replace" certain societal services - especially those beset with volumes of regulation and numerous groups of powerful stakeholders happy to reach out to politicians and the public (AARP, Insurance, numerous govt entities, drs groups, nurses groups).

2/3 of healthcare is paper pushing, the easiest thing the tech community can automate is boring old CRUD paper pushing. I hope one day we as consumers have the chance to get a USB stick to store and retain our own medical records. Walk into dr's office / hospital, hand over device, boom their is your whole history including previous surgeries, allergies, etc. Whatever is done gets imprinted on device, walk out with an updated history. That is some seriously productive low-hanging fruit.

There'd need to be a lot of work making sure that it's safe in that:

a) Losing it should not expose your entire medical history to whoever picks it up

b) Losing it should not mean losing your data forever. Giving the consumer the responsibility for backups is not a solution either, since those can be lost or stolen as well.

c) It has to be tied to the person's identity, so you can't borrow/steal your friend's to get meds

d) Can't be tampered with or forged to fake conditions or clear conditions

e) Records who edits it, when, and a diff of changes.

f) Records who reads it, and when

g) Resistant to physical damage or water. I should be able to go swimming with this device or have it go through the wash without worrying about its safety.

These are all pretty hard problems on their own, and together, you'd have to design pretty much the world's safest storage device. If it existed, I'd put my SSH keys on it too!

actually, most of my patients were not interested in reimbursing me for the cost of the usb stick, although they would gladly accept it for free. I was willing to provide their ENTIRE medical record, but they were not interested. I think people are just as happy to be spoon fed and not knowing what they are eating as long as its free.

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