Zachary Dunn

@zack:mozilla.org

Published on 2021-01-13 14:15:12Z

Everybody is slowly coming to understand that numbers in the health industry are incredibly slow. Articles on vaccine rollout have to mention that hospitals aren't equipped to handle reporting on a 72 hour turnaround. That's because EMRs (electronic medical records) are absolute garbage. They're huge, locked-down, enterprise applications, each controlled by a single vendor and licensed to hospitals for huge fees. They don't have interoperability in mind, they want to lock you in to their silo. If you want to send a report to someone else, you hope they use the same EMR as you or you have to run a convoluted pipeline to get that data to them, usually as a CSV or Excel spreadsheet that they have to run through a convoluted pipeline to get into their system. Maybe after this is all over, that will get some attention. Giant corporations shouldn't be able to control health records and drive up costs for patients and hospital