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