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Healthcare definitely seems like the land of process inefficiency, even in developed countries like here in Canada, so there's plenty of opportunity for major i
by esfandia 10y ago
Healthcare definitely seems like the land of process inefficiency, even in developed countries like here in Canada, so there's plenty of opportunity for major improvement. There's still plenty of paperwork done on... paper, information that constantly has to be repeated when you go from one provider to another, and plenty of mistakes made.
Some time ago Ontario spent a massive amount of money on computerizing healthcare and it yielded nothing. I figure all the regulations, privacy issues, and overall complexity of the system makes it a tough Goliath to handle. And whatever happened to Google Health?
I feel that the solution has to come from the grassroots: get a bunch of health care providers to sync up for certain simple services, and go from there. Keep adding features little by little, keep expanding the number of participants. Do it using published and open source APIs and software. Don't try to be everything to everyone. Break a few rules, ignore some complicated standards if it can help get you there quicker. Hmmm, maybe for the latter to be possible it makes sense to start in less sue-happy countries.
- soperj 10y agoWhat are you basing the yielded nothing on? Canada is well on it's way to Electronic Health Records.
- esfandia 10y agoIt was a big time scandal in around 2009: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ehealth-scandal-a-1b-waste-auditor-1.808640 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ehealth-scandal-a-1b-w... Things may have changed since.
- soperj 10y agoThere was a scandal only in Ontario, doesn't mean that good work hasn't been done in that province, or other provinces.
- markroseman 10y agoNot so much. There are pockets, with poor interoperability between them. Multiply this by the different health systems (one per province, plus assorted others) and it's still a mess unfortunately.
- soperj 10y agoThe e-health standard was developed Nationally. You don't know what you're talking about.
- wvenable 10y agoSomething has changed recently because it seems almost everything is electronic now. A few years ago I even subscribed to get all my test results online; I avoided an unnecessary doctor's appointment because I could see the results myself.
- cal5k 10y agoThis is entirely because of the private sector... the two largest lab companies, Dynacare and LifeLabs, have a duopoly on the lab testing market (at least in Ontario). They may have received some incentives to do this but afaik there was no big policy objective behind it.
- cal5k 10y agoFounder of Akira here (www.akira.md in case you weren't familiar). We try not to break any rules, but you're spot on about the grassroots thing. We decided we couldn't wait for the policy to catch up to the serious problems with our healthcare system and decided to tackle them head-on! Has it been easy? Not at all. Is progress being made? Absolutely!