On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 12:12 AM, Antoine Latter
A good place to start is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HL7 , which is a not-for-profit organization which tries to define interfacing standards between medical devices and medical records providers. I haven't worked much with their standards so I don't know how useful they'd be. I think they might be geared towards vendor-to-vendor interop.
As for the legacy of people who thought it wasn't complex: http://histalk.blog-city.com/guest_article__repeat_after_me_healthcare_data_...
I don't agree with everything the guy wrote, but it's an interesting article.
In an industry like this that generates so much data, I think all parties are tempted to record and track as must as possible. But after all the lab results, x-rays, and MRIs, it's the two or three paragraphs of a doctor's dictation that matter. Maybe patients and doctors would be best served if they had an easy way to store, retrieve, and query these dictations. I see this as an abstracting database problem: - records (dictations) are write-once-read-only data pertaining to a subject (patient) - some users (doctors, patients) are allowed to view a subset of records on a subject - some users are allowed to create new records on a subject - some users are allowed to change capabilities of other users Then, built on top of an abstract distributed data storage problem: - a network of computers store a collection of write-once-read-only data chunks (encoded, fragmented records) - chunks are distributed to minimize access time - chunks are distributed to maintain data integrity through system failures Both of these abstract problems can be used for many things outside the medical field. So even if an electronic health record project does not pan out, the code could find its way into other applications. -Tom