Comment by leovander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leovander | Hacker News Reader

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At this point, everyone is trying to get the data from the hospitals and present it to the patient.

Is there anyone trying to compete with the giants in healthcare to make sure there is clean data to pull from in the first place?

I spend day and night manually reading CCD/CCDA's making sure they match the loose specifications that HL7 provides, but there seems to be so many disconnects between one vendor and another.

I am curious if your digitization of data is mostly pulling from these CCD documents themselves or actually performing OCR on physical data. Yes, there are also DICOM/PDF/etc that can act as attachments as well.

I saw in one of the comments you mentioned about integrating with hospital systems, I am curious to how that might correlate to what access you guys do have and to which patients as well. I am assuming you can piggy back on levels of consent and confidentiality that EMR's already have logic for.

Anyway good luck, if you guys are ever looking for remote (US-CA) let me know.

Clean data is hard, especially with such fragmentation, but there is progress! My company supports CCD/HL7 with as many other vendors as will work with us, but you're right in that the loose specifications make it very hard. I just worked on a project to import 1M+ patient records and we spent a long time verifying that we weren't just getting junk. "This field says it's an ICD-9 code, but I just see a string description..."

We also have a restful API that has a lot more traction with startups (honestly because it makes more sense). There is still so much legacy thinking around "documents" that we are more often trying to step back and think "is there a better paradigm we should be pushing here?".

Thanks for the comment, leovander—very good points! Right now we give hospitals a number of ways to respond to PatientBank requests. Currently, the most common one is fax and we don't (yet) perform much processing of that data. In addition to fax, we allow hospitals to send CCD/CCDAs to us via DIRECT, and we allow them to upload arbitrary files directly to PatientBank as well.

In the future, we'll use whatever APIs we can to get records from hospitals. There's a lot of promising work going on in this space, and we're excited to see where the industry leads!

Is there anyone trying to compete with the giants in healthcare to make sure there is clean data to pull from in the first place?

We are. :)

I empathize with your problem with CCD/HL7v2 as much as you can imagine; which is why we support FHIR infrastructure across a number of use-cases. Feel free to reach out, I always enjoy chatting with people experienced in the space.

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