Having worked as a programmer on a couple of products for the medical industry I would suggest learning as much as possible about what is actually legal / burea

Having worked as a programmer on a couple of products for the medical industry I would suggest learning as much as possible about what is actually legal / bureaucratically acceptable to do with new technology. I have an anesthesiologist friend who asked if I could do something to streamline the reporting process he has to go through before and after a procedure. The process involved entering similar or exactly the same information multiple times. Upon further investigation the process was built on a list of internal and external requirements that would be extremely difficult to change. As a developer I would love to work on something that could improve medical care but without someone who knows the regulations (hippa, fda, etc.) it is hard to know where to start. It gets frustrating to present a list of ideas that are possible (maybe even easy) technologically but get shot down because another authority says you just can't do that.