[PLUG-TALK] About the medical software you see in your physician's office

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Sun Dec 23 16:10:54 UTC 2018


On Sun, 23 Dec 2018, John Jason Jordan wrote:

> If there needs to be interoperability but the commercial entities involved
> refuse to create same, then you need to force them to do so, i.e., laws.
> Given the attitude of current federal lawmakers, it seems unlikely that
> this can be done in Washington DC. But if even a couple states require it,
> Epic and their fellow travelers will have to comply and, once their
> software has been made compatible it will become easy for them to make
> that form of their software available everywhere. You just need to find a
> powerful enough pressure point.

John,

   Looks simple as you describe it, but I think there steep hills to climb.
First, you need a good number of states to pass compatible legislation.
Second, all medical/health software needs to be involved.

   Thinking about what you wrote, it seems to me that a pragmatic approach
would be to start by having knowledgeable people (such as Keith) form a
standards group to develop a universal transfer standard. This would be
analogous to what GDAL does for spatial data <https://www.gdal.org/>; an
intermediate format that permits translation among many different spatial
software formats. This standards group would be an on-going effort that
might be funded by the Gates Foundation as they seem to be in the news
funding medical/health improvement projects.

Rich




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