Granted, it won't cure cancer, but you'll save more lives at the margin than doing Zynga ads. (And, n.b., healthcare clients often have more than $500 available to spend.)
It's struck me that part of the reason people don't try to solve these types of problems because they just don't know the market at all. They solve problems they have exposure to.
Knowing what you know, do you think there's any scope for a "Meet the Market" mini-conference where people with actual problems (and budget) from, say, medecine come along and give a lecture on what problems they'd pay to have solved? Do you think that purchasers have enough knowledge about their own problems that they could verbalise them such that people could help solve them?
Is it annoying? Yes. Does it add cost and complexity? Yes. Are any of the requirements of dubious to nil security value in many cases? Yes. (+)
But HIPAA is not a barrier like "create a meaningful application from nothing" or "successfully navigate an enterprise sales purchasing process" is a barrier. After you've got a handle on what it asks you to do it is really anticlimactic.
+ I am required to have a document which explicitly states that I will discipline myself most severely for misuse of patient information. No joke.
Making software for government is like a two year bidding process. The barriers to entry are incredibly high when it should just be a case of, "Okay, you want X Y and Z as your most critical features, let's keep the initial product small, we can add features as we go along. It'll be done in two months and then we'll iterate."
Instead it's more like, "We're going to have bids for two years for the project and then we're going to want everything done in one pass."
The NHS tried to update their computer systems a while back, it cost them £12 billion and two contractors dropped out of the contract because they were being too difficult to work with. It's still not, I believe, fully deployed.
The BBC tried updating their media management system.... DMI, I believe it was called. And spent £98.5 million on it only to not get the product at the end of the day....
All for things that a reasonable software company could probably have done by iterating over features on a basic product fairly easily.
Then you have things like the Police computer system - which is laughable in its antiquity and difficulty to use. I think there was an article on here quite recently about the awful 911 system.
You know? Things need to change concerning regulation before I think we're going to be able to adequately address those sorts of problems. Otherwise you're going to get these monster projects that effectively have to be done all in one go, which seems like a recipe for disaster.
The not-so-subtle subtext was that "I, erm, actually sell software which does pretty much exactly this." The how, in relevant fashion: create software which does appointment reminding phone calls for, without loss of generality, HVAC contractors. Read up on HIPAA requirements and talk to people who've done it before. Do some very boring paperwork and not-all-that-impressive technical work for ticking off the boxes. Start landing hospital clients, through a combination of slackadaiscal meat-and-potatoes SEO and being a lot more hungry for their business at the low end than the competition is.
I don't typically compete in or win two year bid cycles. I go after smaller projects in the $X,000 to $X0,000 a year range. The sales process often involves convincing a single nurse or office manager that I'm not some slick sales guy from the big city who is going to sell her $10,000 of software where she needs $2,000 and then never be there for her if it breaks.
Your mileage (kilometerage?) may vary in the United Kingdom.
You can't just set up a service with a Facebook log in and have people connecting medical information, so it's not something that's going to end up getting viral or posted on blogs or TechCrunch, and the only people that are going to see your service are the ones that work for our clients.
I can't even put 99% of what I do on a regular basis into a portfolio or anything because of these regulations.
I guess my point is there _are_ companies doing things like this, while being successful and social conscious, they just won't be publicized like Angry Birds or the Find-Vegan-Bacon-In-SF-Apps.