As far as I can tell, there's no economic incentive for health care systems to undergo these transformations willingly. Remember, the digital transformation didn't occur until the HITECH act in 2009, which mandated the use of electronic health records. Why digitize your operations and worry about maintaining tech infrastructure when you can do everything on paper with a handful of secretaries? You could argue providing better data-driven healthcare to patients, but guess what--most health systems don't care because
they make money every time you get sick.[0]
With HITECH, the government forced them to transition to EHRs, and here's what hospital systems optimized for...
1. Reliability
2. Optimizing billing
3. Guaranteeing compliance with different protocols, particularly those related to billing
Openess? Interoperability? They don't care. You're piling on more technical and administrative costs without the promise of future returns.
> ensuring highly trained individuals have half decent tools would be a huge goal for society - but almost all healthcare software is still frankly, terrible.
You know who hates EHRs the most? Doctors. Do you know who loves them? Hospital administrators. Guess who pays for the EHR? ;)
[0]: An exception to this is Kaiser Permanente. They insure the patients for which they care, so they're incetivized to improve health to reduce costs over time.
With HITECH, the government forced them to transition to EHRs, and here's what hospital systems optimized for...
1. Reliability
2. Optimizing billing
3. Guaranteeing compliance with different protocols, particularly those related to billing
Openess? Interoperability? They don't care. You're piling on more technical and administrative costs without the promise of future returns.
> ensuring highly trained individuals have half decent tools would be a huge goal for society - but almost all healthcare software is still frankly, terrible.
You know who hates EHRs the most? Doctors. Do you know who loves them? Hospital administrators. Guess who pays for the EHR? ;)
[0]: An exception to this is Kaiser Permanente. They insure the patients for which they care, so they're incetivized to improve health to reduce costs over time.