The Tiny Provision that Could Spark a Revolution in Health Tech | Hacker News Reader

The Tiny Provision that Could Spark a Revolution in Health Tech

tracehealth.com

16 pointsthisnoga5 comments

I understand why the author is upset, but it's perfectly reasonable to think that medical providers who are still storing your health records on paper on a shelf can't get you a JSON feed of your cholesterol results.

If we want access to our health data on this level we'll first have to get all medical providers into the digital age (and do it with open, compatible solutions before proprietary solutions become the norm and set us 50 years back).

Not sure if I did a good job of explaining things in the post, but the point is that, this is the requirement for hospitals/doctors who are already on electronic records. So, you're on electronic records, but your requirement for sending data electronically is a pdf? Feels like a huge lost opportunity.

And the problem of "closed" systems is exactly what we're trying to solve with Trace Health (not to be too self promoting.) The proprietary systems aren't going away, but new government regs mean that patients are now going to be able to log in and see their data online (in crappy patient portals). We credential in on the patients behalf, pull the data out, normalize it with records from their other siloed, proprietary systems and then make it easy to understand, download, etc...

It's clearly not the way we'd architect our health care system if we were starting over, but hopefully a helpful hack for those of us who have no choice but to deal with the healthcare system as it is.

-Noga

Oh, okay. That makes more sense. Sorry if I misunderstood.

There's a much larger problem this article ignores. Now is NOT a great time to enter the electronic health records and data industry. That industry has been flooded with ideas and products for the last decade from large and small groups alike. They have disagreed on standards, formats and interopability.

This is why some people just throw their arms up and say, "take the fucking PDF and leave me alone."

Totally disagree! It's an amazing time to be in the industry. Even though we have to deal with non-interoperability and lack of consistent formats, at least the data is now electronic. the Industry has also pretty much settled on the HL7 XML format. The EMRs can easily produce this document and most already use it for communicating with outside systems. If the gov is going to say that patients get access to their data electronically, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to get it under this standard instead of printed on a pdf.

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