Let me tell you why EHR/EMR is a joke: There are no standards. That's it. Epic, Cerner, GE, Dairyland, OpenVista, and the 180 other people who make electroni

Let me tell you why EHR/EMR is a joke: There are no standards. That's it. Epic, Cerner, GE, Dairyland, OpenVista, and the 180 other people who make electronic medical/health record software all have proprietary file formats and standards. The systems can't talk to each other, and there's a ginormous industry in jury-rigging protocols to make them semi-sorta work. It's a joke. Of course, in the only place where we've had a standard, we've seen massive innovation in technology. Radiology's DICOM standard is, to me, the single reason why we've gone so far so fast. Because everything is portable, vendors actually have to innovate rather than relying on lock-in. If Obama wants to save lives through EMR, he's going to have to dictate a file format standard. My contacts and friends at these firms have told me that it would take up to three years of full-on full-time development for everyone to change their software to work with a new file format. But until we do, every dollar that goes to EMR is nothing more than corporate welfare.