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Comment by wehadfun | Hacker News Reader

I feel the correct solution to this problem is for legislation that forces hospitals to quickly, easily, and cheaply share patient information. If you go to one hospital and then go to another hospital up the street even though they probably both use epic they have to fax or mail records. Not for technical reasons but bureaucratic ones.

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The US currently has public comment on a rule/law/requirement requiring interoperability https://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/draft-trusted-e...

It’s not exactly what you want, but it’s a lot closer.

That legislation is in place. It just requires some leg work on the patient end (you have a right to ask for your entire medical record with a covered entity).

Sharing by default will never be a standard because it represents too many risks for data falling into the wrong hands.

You would be correct. The fix is to have the Department of Health and Human Services administer health records [1], and use Medicare funding as the stick to require its use.

[1] This requires public policy implementation, US Digital Service/18F levels of technical competency, along with ruthless transparency and governance.

After the OPM debacle with security clearance records, I would not trust the government to do this properly.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/09/politics/office-of-personnel-...

But you would trust a single hospital (or hospital network) to run Epic securely (and all that entails from a security and risk management perspective)?

As someone affected by the OPM breach, I agree that it is bad. You can't paint the entire government with a broad brush though.

Absolutely not.

I'd like to opt out of all of it. But there's really no way.

Indeed. That is why there are no "best" solutions, only the least bad solution.

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