It would be diplomatic to say that the rise of open standards and APIs in the healthcare industry has yet to truly pay off in the form of better widespread patient data portability, reduced complexity in the systems behind payments and claims, better quality metrics and outcomes, or better automation of menial paperwork or other manual process. Our health IT systems are only getting more and more silo-ed and disintegrated, and there’s always a new venture-backed SaaS provider or software vendor who just wants to solve that by centralizing (er, “vertically integrating”) all data and processes on their systems, adding to the problem rather than solving it. The client-server model for applications just doesn’t work for an industry as complex, heterogenous, and political as healthcare. Could blockchain technology be helpful here?
More here.
