Apparently the electronic medical records business is in as bad shape as I feared. Yesterday's WSJ had a story about the electronic medical record system used by the Veteran's Administration. The system is public domain open source and very-low-cost to free. VA has been using it for twenty years. One hitch, the VA merely offers the source code. The hospital has to employ some computer geeks to compile it and install it and do maintainance (bug fixes). The VA software is good except for one thing. No billing functions (VA doesn't bill veterans). The hospital computer geeks will have to find or write a billing module, but this has been done.
The article went on to say that competing commercial medical records programs cost heavily and are not compatible with each other. This means that electronic patient records created by system X cannot be read by system Y. So change hospitals or doctors or health plans and your medical record is in jeopardy.
You might have known.
Looks like a business opportunity for some computer geeks to set themselves up in business offering the VA program to hospitals.
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