As a techie with a medical doctorate, I've considered these sorts of things too.
The basic problem is that if you want to have records in the computer someone has to input them in a more or less structured manner. This is the issue that is usually left out of EMR discussions. Electronic health records are a trade-off. Everyone realizes there are benefits, but if you ignore the costs when making important decisions, it usually turns out badly.
Because of this, usually what happens is that skilled medical professionals end up saddled with a second data-entry job.
OCR and voice recognition (which you didn't mention, but I think is also a good fit) are both useful tools. However, if you really think about it, the minimum viable product in this space is actually a medical transcriptionist service. Let doctors (and nurses) use the easiest, fastest system they can for recording data (ie paper, or voice), let the DBA's store everything in a massive database for efficient retrieval and make money by providing an efficient reliable method for converting between the two.
Comments
As a techie with a medical doctorate, I've considered these sorts of things too.
The basic problem is that if you want to have records in the computer someone has to input them in a more or less structured manner. This is the issue that is usually left out of EMR discussions. Electronic health records are a trade-off. Everyone realizes there are benefits, but if you ignore the costs when making important decisions, it usually turns out badly.
Because of this, usually what happens is that skilled medical professionals end up saddled with a second data-entry job.
OCR and voice recognition (which you didn't mention, but I think is also a good fit) are both useful tools. However, if you really think about it, the minimum viable product in this space is actually a medical transcriptionist service. Let doctors (and nurses) use the easiest, fastest system they can for recording data (ie paper, or voice), let the DBA's store everything in a massive database for efficient retrieval and make money by providing an efficient reliable method for converting between the two.