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Comment by ejain | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that keeps me out of the healthcare space is that you could build the most amazing tool, yet it wouldn't catch on because no one has enough time or incentives to start using it (and you're not playing golf with the right people).

That said, PicnicHealth looks nice, and I wish them best luck! The pricing seems a bit high for someone who doesn't have health issues and just wants to keep track of regular tests, but I find it easier to trust a paid service than a company with a surprise business model.

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Besides, Comprehensive health records as well as yearly physicals are meaningless for healthy people.

I also found that people don't trust paid services either, when it comes to their health (at least when provided by companies other than their health provider)

I like the idea behind Zenobase. Aurametrix explored relationships between many different sources of data that could be related to health. It is not public now, but would be happy to share the insights.

One of the things that keeps me out of the healthcare space is...

I dropped out, after implementing five exchanges, because it became obvious to all of us doing the work that single payer was the only correct answer. All of our customers and partners were competitors and had no incentive to share data.

I didn't anticipate consolidation of providers, perhaps accelerated by the passage of ACA. Babysteps, eventually leading to single payer? I don't know.

Maybe I should have stuck it out.

Founder here - Thanks for the good wishes! I totally agree that lots of people don't have the time or inclination to worry about this stuff. I used to be just like that, and then I got sick. That changes everything. When you're ability to function, feel good, and even live hinges on this stuff, you start paying attention real fast.

For the moment we're focused on folks with serious illnesses, but we've got plans down the road for pricing and a product geared more toward the casual user. Thanks again!

Another problem is that doctors and health in General is highly specialized. So a doctor needs a set of options while the next needs another, etc.

So it's kind of hard to fit everything in one basket. There is HL7 that should a sort of golden standard but many programmers on the field totally ignore it.

I hate HL7 with a passion.

As for docs, the main problem is that they've spent the last century or two training snowflake workflows and vocabularies. :(

FHIR is a step in the right direction http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/fhir/

Yes! I am also quite excited for FHIR!

Urk. I'm not impressed--it's already shaping up to be super-enterprisey and architecture-astronauty, and supporting binary stuff means folks will keep smuggling in HL7 v2.

HL7 isn't a single standard; it's a standards body which publishes many different standards each with multiple versions. And it's not really practical to fully implement them all. So if you want to interoperate with an external system first you have to find out which flavors of HL7 they support and then build around that.

Some people criticize HL7 for being overly complex. And there is some truth to that due to legacy issues. But the reality is that healthcare is tremendously complex and so that drives a certain level of unavoidable complexity in the standards.

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