Thursday, October 06, 2005
MedsList and EHR
Graham has made a very cool looking online medication list, which patients can use to track their medications. This is the kind of project of which I'd love to see more examples; simple and targeted. It aims to address a single topic: medication management.
Too many solutions I see on a daily basis (working mainly in health IT as I do) try to be the Killer App, but end up just being bloated and confusing and useless. Instead, I wish developers would work within the already existing standards, and create small, flexible, interoperable programs, which could be put together in various combinations to constitute the appropriate Electronic Health Record for a given practice or institution.
Take an example (albeit not a great one): I run Windows as my OS, Photoshop as my image editor, Firefox as my browser (with Java no less), StarOffice for productivity, and JetAudio for sound. All made by different companies, all specializing in their own thing, all interoperable with each other. Shouldn't health applications be the same??
Too many solutions I see on a daily basis (working mainly in health IT as I do) try to be the Killer App, but end up just being bloated and confusing and useless. Instead, I wish developers would work within the already existing standards, and create small, flexible, interoperable programs, which could be put together in various combinations to constitute the appropriate Electronic Health Record for a given practice or institution.
Take an example (albeit not a great one): I run Windows as my OS, Photoshop as my image editor, Firefox as my browser (with Java no less), StarOffice for productivity, and JetAudio for sound. All made by different companies, all specializing in their own thing, all interoperable with each other. Shouldn't health applications be the same??
