No technological improvement is worth risking the health of a patient. I disagree, least of all because the health of the patients should be put ahead of the h

No technological improvement is worth risking the health of a patient. I disagree, least of all because the health of the patients should be put ahead of the health of a patient. The fact is that this unreasonable fear of harming patients has caused everyone to be completely blind to the routine fuckups and inefficiencies which, when taken together, doom the industry and patients as a whole. Let's look at EMRs. Epic, for example. Integrating with Epic is pretty hard--unless the client really twists their arm, they basically won't say anything to help you with their software or access their piles of shitty databases (mumps lol). They get paid tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year (per hospital!) to handle the task of not losing patient records, a task at which they semi-succeed. They have no incentive to change. Oh, and one more thing...hospitals are deathly afraid of having data duplication anywhere, so they freak out if you start looking like you're a sibling system to their EMR instead of just blindly consuming it. Moreover, they--like many smaller vendors--do extreme customization work that basically guarantees a new learning curve everytime somebody moves to a new system. And the software looks like garbage, and is hard to use, but at least lives aren't on the line and nobody was risked being harmed by some ~crazy new startup EMR~. Hah, oh wait, they are on the line, and people die due to bad medication decisions that aren't flagged or are flagged and ignored by the system. And this whole system? Most of the mess is geared towards solving the billing problem. It isn't geared towards the patients records problem, towards the "what did this patient's body do at this time" problem. It isn't geared towards the "hey, that's odd, all my lab messages have the same jank-ass free-text formatting instead of an interface from the 90s". The fact is that the vendors and hospitals have conspired in their fear and greed to basically raise the barrier to entry so high that iterating on new designs to help is quite hard, and instead just a good way of giving yourself an aneurysm. And you don't want that, because by that time you'll want to step nowhere near a hospital.