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Comment by RivieraKid | Hacker News Reader

I wish some tech billionaire or rich tech company invested in rethinking healthcare from the ground up (or like Elon Musk likes to say, from first principles) with focus on UX, state-of-the-art technologies and integration. Anytime I use our healthcare (although, this is the Czech Rep, could be different in USA), I feel like it should be easy to design a better service.

Basically, something what Tesla did, apply Silicon Valley tech startup mentality in a non-tech industry.

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Many have tried, but my guess is that it's extremely difficult mainly because the government is involved, and decades of archaic systems (and minds) that you need to deal with. The word "fast" isn't in the vocabulary in this industry, and every decision moves at a snail's pace. Granted, there's a reason and you can't simply fuck up and prioritize into the next sprint that you'll fix the previous fuckup.

The other issue (at least in the USA) is a ton of compliance stuff you have to deal with. HIPAA compliance is such a pain in the ass. It's not "cool" or fun, so it doesn't usually attract great devs or people that don't want to deal with constant red tape and permissions for accessing things. Naturally, this business sort of attracts the bureaucratic minded people and the really efficient people end up frustrated/burn out and move into an industry where getting shit done is easily quantifiable in the short term.

Regardless, I work in the healthcare industry currently and it's a shitshow for lack of a better word.

Large part of the issue is any downtime of existing systems is generally considered completely unacceptable in health care.

Yep. The other thing is that generally any sort of screw up (apart from server down time) by a company will cause extreme distrust from partners to the point of failure of your business. It's extremely tricky.

I think rethinking healthcare would start with better nutrition education and a focus on preventing disease. Med school has almost no nutrition education and doctors are largely ignorant of food's role on disease. Most cases of heart disease and diabetes are largely preventable.

Preventing those 2 diseases alone would save the country billions, if not trillions, a year in medical costs.

One problem that can't probably solved by simply "focusing on the UX and better service" is that the service provider (medical professional) is both responsible for evaluating what's wrong with you (and what services you need) and the administering the treatment.

Judging the quality of the medical service is also often difficult. The true quality and the utility of the service you receive will often be apparent only years or decades later. Did a patient need for antibiotics for a basic viral infection? Probably not but it feels like a better service.

Except you can't just manufacture healthcare in your back yard and win with capitalism. The whole industry is deeply and systemically regulated - trying to stir the pot gets you sued, either by existing hospitals for your threat or by any patient dissatisfied with the results of your treatment. Or by state health agencies that see you not following the extraordinarily rigid rulebook on how healthcare is to be done.

We are as far from a market where you can experiment with healthcare as you can be aside from outright banning private medical practice.

https://theranos.com/ :-)

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