thisnoga

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.

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