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Comment by tricky | Hacker News Reader

Is there anyone else on HN who gets excited about distributed HL7 systems and healthcare?

I don't know if you're being facetious or not, but I think that it's interesting that they trusted a very new language for doing health care related work.

I'm serious. I get snubbed every time I mention a healthcare startup to a group of hackers. This is me saying, "hey, look, it _can_ be cool..."

The health industry is one of the last great bits of arcane magic. Everything about it is hand-wavey. You've got all kinds of regulations and tons of data and all of the carriers have their own little fiefdoms and everything is done a thousand different ways... Don't even get me started on actuaries.

wow, i couldn't have paid you to illustrate my point any better.

Where there is fear, there are opportunities.

I worked on a highly unsuccessful multi-billion dollar health system that was intended to solve all of these problems on a national level. I can tell you now that a small guy working from the bottom up with individual institutions is much better placed to solve real problems than a top-down bureaucracy. The only hurdle is convincing them that they can trust your system with confidential and life-critical data.

I work at a highly successful company thats working to solve some of the problems the health care industry faces(mainly the elder care community). We grow by 20% annually and we have goals of 28% when we only grow by 26 as opposed to 28 we see it as bad.

And yes the rules, and crazy laws, and hand waving are very very apparent. Its insane but we make plenty of money.

20-30% annually? Nice.

I'm a one-man startup working to solve problems in the clinical trial and research space. The sheer number of problems can be somewhat distracting and the rules daunting, but there are a lot of doctors out there with money to throw at solutions. It is amazing.

Am I profitable? Not yet. Obviously, I'm missing some necessary traits (read: co-founder.)

Yes! There are often great revenue opportunities serving less sexy markets - you've still got to make something people want! (Or require by law ;))

good to see some other people in the same space. I'm at an established small/medium sized company in the health industry. The health stuff is fulfilling and concrete (ie you're really solving someone's problem). There's plenty of scope for "cool stuff".

From the link above, it appears that they came up with an integration product that pretty much talks to all other systems at the customer site. Given this, I would speculate that the product probably does not deal with data that probably automates/affects/interferes with a patients diagnosis/procedure atleast as of now.

Yes, absolutely! I spent nearly 4 years working in a hospital on the EMR systems. Seeing your software in use when a patient is coding in the CCU is both humbling and exciting - the patient lived. It motivates you to tighten the UI and insure data quality beyond what you'll do for any other field. Having severe budget constraints - I believe - caused us to be more innovative than any other IT department or vendor I've worked for.

Yes, I deal with that stuff every day. I've built what's probably one of the more complete implementations of the HL7 V2 messaging standard.

You are not alone. I think it is amazing to see newer technologies incorporated into HL7 systems.

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