I work with electronic medical records on the research side, integrating clinical patient data with medical research and clinical trials. However, I work with a large teaching hospital rather than small practices.
A home run offering for our environment would include a migration path for data from years (and many thousands of patient's data) currently in a patched-together system with 40 years of duct tape holding it all together. Top it off with a massive dose of free text data fields (so no easy field extraction) and you're looking at a huge custom effort to pull it off.
But . . . I think there is room here for something that does something nice with machine learning and NLP. Some folks looking into this have found that even free text in path reports contains a significant amount of exploitable structure from a data mining perspective.
And once you solve the migration, you'll have to go around the heavily entrenched IT groups holding the duct tape. But, it would be a big win for patients and most physicians are looking for a better solution . . .
>you'll have to go around the heavily entrenched IT groups
The fattest IT guy I ever saw worked database administration for a university hospital. He had his own elevator to his own floor of the building, and you needed a key to get on the elevator! In 2009 that hospital was still using meditech, and still using it on dedicated terminals with orange monochrome CRTs.
A home run offering for our environment would include a migration path for data from years (and many thousands of patient's data) currently in a patched-together system with 40 years of duct tape holding it all together. Top it off with a massive dose of free text data fields (so no easy field extraction) and you're looking at a huge custom effort to pull it off.
But . . . I think there is room here for something that does something nice with machine learning and NLP. Some folks looking into this have found that even free text in path reports contains a significant amount of exploitable structure from a data mining perspective.
And once you solve the migration, you'll have to go around the heavily entrenched IT groups holding the duct tape. But, it would be a big win for patients and most physicians are looking for a better solution . . .