Spent a year doing analysis of EMR data. Talk about a tar pit. Few industries are as backward and obstinate to change as healthcare. Every clerk and doc has the

Spent a year doing analysis of EMR data. Talk about a tar pit. Few industries are as backward and obstinate to change as healthcare. Every clerk and doc has their way to do something and is quite against change, which is painfully ironic, given the docs are some smart folks. For example: patient phone number, sounds simple? Some clerks enter a number, other leave blank (NULL), others enter ZZZ-ZZZ-ZZZZ for blank, others all 5's, or all 9's, or all 7's, or some other number that only they know means blank. And that's for something as trivial as a phone number, now imagine symptoms, measurements, etc. We've got a long way to go.