

The 2010 Health 2.0 Developer Challenge, a Collection of Developer Challenges - ros3
http://health2challenge.org/

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yellowbkpk
I would absolutely _love_ to see something like this happen but with
challenges from the major players in the healthcare market: Philips, Siemens,
GE, etc. There is a spectacular array of startups and applications that could
spring up if the extremely thick and crusty shell is peeled off of healthcare
data access.

I worked on a team that spent 5 years on a realtime data protocol for one of
these companies and didn't get very far. I left 6 months ago and they're still
working on it.

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baran
Right there with you. Practice Fusion, while a popular vendor, will never be
able to get at the major providers with their "free" EMR. However, their API
is a step in the right direction.

We are working on technology which begins to get at this locked-in data via an
API package which would be installed at individual institutions. The
technology utilizes HL7 messaging to get at data from the major players (ie.
Epic, GE, Cerner). The problem is the main software vendor, Epic, has built
their technology up, by erecting proprietary barriers, an API would kill their
entire model. Therefore the best way to get at this industry is through the
providers, as they are becoming increasingly burden by these proprietary,
legacy systems.

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pxlpshr
All of these developer challenges popping up remind me of something we've long
loathed in the advertising industry: spec work aka contests. It's worth noting
that compliancy is a billion-dollar problem, and if you help them solve it you
get $2,500 and a ticket to Health 2.0.

From a high level perspective, "health 2.0" is very interesting to me, and the
research I've done in recent months has led me to believe that it's not a
place for your run of the mill startup. You need some serious gunpowder to
survive. However, it does seem ripe for a few disruptions.

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baran
I'm currently working with Health 2.0 to access these technologies. In my
opinion the most exciting of these is the challenge issued by Practice Fusion.
This is the first time I have seen a vendor begin to open up their system.

As was stated in a previous comment, there are a large variety of applications
which would benefit from access to actual medical data, and not require manuel
entry. IMHO, this manual entry is why services like Google Health and
Microsoft HealthVault will never take off.

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acconrad
Does anybody want to get together to solve one of these? This seems kind of
interesting and would be neat to develop.

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baran
I'm interested. Email is in profile, let me know what you are thinking.

