Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

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> Health Care will be more difficult

To implement Health Care is an immense systems integration problem.

Having done some system integration work on a much smaller scale, it seems to me that in the US, more universal health care is an effective subsidy of IT for years. I think we can't really expect a working universal health care system for years.

Using Britain as a possible analogy, building the actual master universal health care system to handle billing and invoices and patient care will be a technical and political challenge that will suck resources from patient care to IT [1].

Integration is a difficult problem and with 452 HMOs in the US - even though some will be inevitably consolidated - there will be plenty of IT work [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Service_(Englan...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health

http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publicatio...

[2] http://www.statehealthfacts.org/profileind.jsp?ind=347&c...

Sorry to "talk my book" as well - our start-up provides a personal health records system that is connecting the UK's providers where the government's master system approach has failed - but investing in IT does not suck resources from patient care, it frees them up. I noticed this as a physician having to walk around the hospital to deliver pieces of paper. So I wrote software for Palm Pilots with a peer-to-peer encrypted handover system, gave it away, and convinced each of my colleagues to buy a Palm themselves. Each of instantly saved time they could spend on patient care, and the quality and accuracy of our handovers increased.

The problem of health care integration is not just solvable, it is already being solved (we are playing our part) but many in the mainstream are still expecting a big system approach and thus missing the small pieces, loosely joined approach that allowed the internet to scale.

I think he means suck resources more in a financial way, the money to build a big all encompassing system will have to come from somewhere and it will result in less money for patient care in the short term. Of course if the system was actually built and working it would then free up resources.

What are the healthcare startups he's invested in?

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