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What health care records really need is a set of RFC-like standards documents. These documents would define the information that a health record must have; or how interrogations of the database should behave. You make sure you include a requirement for the data to be transportable. Once those documents have been done you allow the market to create the software and hospitals (etc) to buy the software.

The UK had a ridiculous mostly failed system that cost £12 billion for a population of about 60 million people. A lot of that is from the UK traditional terrible huge it project implementation, but also from a top-down approach by people who didn't really know what they were doing.

> Let’s consider what an unstructured electronic health record would look like and cost. You’d create a directory in Google Drive or Dropbox and give doctors and hospitals access to this directory. Physicians could type into a shared Google Doc with other physicians or upload scanned output from tests, etc. It would be paperless, organized, and electronic, but not very structured.

With medical records you need to know who has accessed them (when and why); who has changed them (and if they had the permissions level to make changes (eg, receptionist can change appointments, doctors can change prescribed meds, nurse can add test results); who has the notes now (and lock the notes for single person only); all of this needs cryptographic signing. (Because people die when doctors make mistakes, and doctors do make mistakes.)

"Chuck it on dropbox" is a bafflingly bad idea.



You mean standards like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_medical_record#Techn...

those?

Or do you mean yet another standard that supposedly solves all the problems, ala The 15th Standard?

http://xkcd.com/927/


Your point is weaker when the link you provide starts

> Though there are few standards for modern day EMR systems as a whole




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