4 ms·

Interested in hearing more. I've heard the same sentiment from not just old (~30 yr old) practices but just-starting ones. Like any non-technical market, they

by momojo 2y ago

Interested in hearing more. I've heard the same sentiment from not just old (~30 yr old) practices but just-starting ones. Like any non-technical market, they just bought what was pitched, and there's often more gripes than complains. One example: When a patient transfers to another dental office, their records need to follow. Before you "had to" fax or snail-mail them. The software/cloud solutions promised streamlined, painless transfers, but those benefits never really materialized due to the amount of HIPA-compliancy issues (the details around this pain point are fuzzy). The office-manager explaining all of this was (half-jokingly) fantasizing about going back to snail mail.

silverquiet 2y ago
I work in infrastructure for an EHR provider, so interoperability isn't really my area, but I do work with devs who must do this. I'd say the problem is approximately zero to do with HIPAA; we almost never even talk about it in my experience. It's just a lack of standards, and poor implementations of what standards do exist - every once in awhile something will crash because of a weird escape character or something in an HL7 message (though that could be on us no doubt). I believe last year was the first time that there was a mandated standard to export EHR data and one of the devs was complaining that it didn't even say if units should be imperial or metric. I'm told the labs are a complete mess and have no federally mandated standards; I know they've written code because doctor X wants to use lab Y. Obviously the big national labs win because you only have to write code for them once and all customers can use them. It's just another aspect of a broken American healthcare "system" - there's no incentive for anyone to interoperate in the best case, and in the worst case it allows you to create lock-in for your product.

by momojo 2y ago

silverquiet 2y ago

I work in infrastructure for an EHR provider, so interoperability isn't really my area, but I do work with devs who must do this. I'd say the problem is approximately zero to do with HIPAA; we almost never even talk about it in my experience. It's just a lack of standards, and poor implementations of what standards do exist - every once in awhile something will crash because of a weird escape character or something in an HL7 message (though that could be on us no doubt). I believe last year was the first time that there was a mandated standard to export EHR data and one of the devs was complaining that it didn't even say if units should be imperial or metric. I'm told the labs are a complete mess and have no federally mandated standards; I know they've written code because doctor X wants to use lab Y. Obviously the big national labs win because you only have to write code for them once and all customers can use them. It's just another aspect of a broken American healthcare "system" - there's no incentive for anyone to interoperate in the best case, and in the worst case it allows you to create lock-in for your product.