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There are a lot of industries the Net should 'kill.' Take health care technology for example. At the end of the day electronic medical records are just getting

by dmillar 17y ago

There are a lot of industries the Net should 'kill.' Take health care technology for example. At the end of the day electronic medical records are just getting data in/out of a system. The Net, or the web, is great at this. You can make this adequately secure and distributable and scalable across the globe with little or no setup expense. The key is getting the good-old-boys to except and institute change, and this requires a large effort in educating.

chadgeidel 17y ago
Or realty (buying and selling houses). At least here in the USA it's a complete racket. You simply cannot buy a house without a Realtor (TM). It's disgusting. This is a great start-up website opportunity (like AutoTrader.com), but I've heard (anecdotally of course) that legal pitfalls abound.
- silent_tone 17y ago
  Redfin.com is working to make this a little better, and is already profitable.
nradov 17y ago
Electronic medical records are a lot more complicated than getting data in/out of a system. You also need alerts for new data, query mechanisms, prescription writing, ordering, trending, etc. All all of that functionality needs to be available through a fast and usable UI. None of that is impossible, there are a lot of EMR / EHR products, but building everything and getting all the details right is a huge development effort. Then if you want to share data across multiple organizations it's an even higher level of complexity. Industry organizations like HL7, HITSP, IHE, and CCHIT are doing good work to decrease interoperability costs. But we're still far from being able to build plug-and-play systems across the whole industry. The US has no central registry of healthcare provider organizations, so in general if you need data on a particular patient you won't even know who to query. And to even be allowed to electronically connect to another organization you need to have a legal contract in place first, either directly or through an umbrella organization. The good-old-boys network isn't (much) of a problem in healthcare informatics. The real problems are irreducible complexity and legal / political issues.
- dmillar 17y ago
  Notice I said, "at the end of the day." I certainly didn't mean to trivialize the task. Only to say that you can build a web app (and certainly some already exist) the could "kill" the traditional EMR systems. I'm well aware of the complexities involved, but wanted to avoid diluting the topic at hand.

by dmillar 17y ago

chadgeidel 17y ago

Or realty (buying and selling houses). At least here in the USA it's a complete racket. You simply cannot buy a house without a Realtor (TM). It's disgusting. This is a great start-up website opportunity (like AutoTrader.com), but I've heard (anecdotally of course) that legal pitfalls abound.

silent_tone 17y ago
Redfin.com is working to make this a little better, and is already profitable.

nradov 17y ago

Electronic medical records are a lot more complicated than getting data in/out of a system. You also need alerts for new data, query mechanisms, prescription writing, ordering, trending, etc. All all of that functionality needs to be available through a fast and usable UI. None of that is impossible, there are a lot of EMR / EHR products, but building everything and getting all the details right is a huge development effort. Then if you want to share data across multiple organizations it's an even higher level of complexity. Industry organizations like HL7, HITSP, IHE, and CCHIT are doing good work to decrease interoperability costs. But we're still far from being able to build plug-and-play systems across the whole industry. The US has no central registry of healthcare provider organizations, so in general if you need data on a particular patient you won't even know who to query. And to even be allowed to electronically connect to another organization you need to have a legal contract in place first, either directly or through an umbrella organization. The good-old-boys network isn't (much) of a problem in healthcare informatics. The real problems are irreducible complexity and legal / political issues.

dmillar 17y ago
Notice I said, "at the end of the day." I certainly didn't mean to trivialize the task. Only to say that you can build a web app (and certainly some already exist) the could "kill" the traditional EMR systems. I'm well aware of the complexities involved, but wanted to avoid diluting the topic at hand.