Would love to know your thoughts/suggestions.
Which target audience did you have in mind?
Primarily Doctor/Nurse/Practitioner centric?
Primarily Administrative (Practice-as-a-whole) centric?
Insurance centric/integrated with insurance systems/standards?
The trickiest part about it all that I've found, is that at the end of the day, practitioners tend to only need a few pages or so worth of notes, but most modern, proprietary alternatives tend to morph into gigantic, data vacuums actually intended for somebody's (generally an insurance company's) data analytics department.
Which don't get me wrong; I realize that was the point behind EHR; greater interoperability and communicability of health records between disparate systems.
For most proprietary offerings, I believe the value is that your vendor whips up and manages the data model and infrastructure for you (or offers a reasonable template); and will typically integrate some sort of rules engine because why not.
To be honest though, I'd absolutely love to figure out how to implement a suite of tools to make EHR easy for practitioners, plus maybe an application with sufficient and accessible enough documentation so that a sufficiently savvy practitioner would be able to out of the box basically have a good digital SOAP note-book, and could overtime build up the data they want to track in a logical, but user (not necessarily developer friendly) manner.
Basically, something as accessible as making a .dot template for printing out, or filling out blank SOAP notes forms for entry in a binder, but also having enough back-end where if need be, that data can have ETL's cobbled together for migration. Plus all the HIPAA goodness.
Unfortunately; I don't know as the market would see much uptake in the U.S. since the insurance industry kind of wags the rest of the medical industry's data collection practices due to how tightly integrated/dependent the healthcare industry is with the health insurance industry.
The centralization increases visibility of a lot of problems; however, everyone pays the price with requirements implication chain becoming longer than the amount of wire between you and the insurer.
It's definitely a hefty undertaking and that's why I was keen to know what HN thinks. Is there anyway we can get in touch (i.e. Email)?
I'm in the process of recovering some orphaned personal projects at the moment, but I'd be happy to try to aid in requirements gathering, and architecting for testabilty.
Even if you succeed in making past this barrier, the next barrier is finding clients as many are not willing to chance it on a new platform given unless they're a new practice themselves but often they want an organization that's already established. Though, given the overall satisfaction I've seen, it's ripe for the taking.
HIPAA and government regulatory compliance is the ghost that will next stop haunting you. That's why the business logic layer of so many applications is so obfuscated and runs extremely deep. Government compliance comes in waves of quarters with the first of the year being the biggest where everything has to be in place with a huge risk if there's a failure.
Though, it also goes without saying that healthcare IT is one of the largest targets. So there's that.
If your exit strategy is to get bought out, you're in luck as many of the big players readily consume any upcomers to maintain their death grip on the industry. They have virtually limitless capital to make it happen.
Despite having said this, it would be something worth contributing towards.