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Why American medicine still runs on fax machines
https://www.Vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american-medical-system-fax-machines-why Great article explains how the inability to kill the “cockroach of American medicine” illustrates the incentives or anti-incentives toward data sharing & interoperability HT @DShaywitz

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“Competitive pressure between the companies that sell electronic record makers themselves only made things worse. The electronic record makers don’t have much incentive to connect well with other records, when they’d rather just convert that hospital on a different electronic platform into one of their own customers.

“When you want competing entities to share information, you have to realize that they’re sharing things that could help their competitors” “If [electronic record vendors] expended all that time and effort to make it so anyone could plug into any other system, it’s reducing the advantage of staying on your particular network,” Mostashari says.

This is especially true for larger electronic medical record companies, which want to sell the advantages of joining a record that is used in lots of doctor offices. “You want to make it easier for people to say, ‘Hey, if you’re on [our electronic record], look how awesome it is! You can talk to any user, anywhere in the country,” he argues.

In short, economics gave hospitals plenty of reasons not to connect their records with other hospitals — to stick with a clunky
technology, like fax, that makes it hard to transmit information. And the government didn’t give any incentives to connect — it stopped at digitizing medicine, falling short of the interoperability that patients actually want.
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Dara sharing http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1516564 Deems #datascientists as “research parasites,” using another’s data for their own ends via @dspakowicz

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“A second concern held by some is that a new class of research person will emerge — people who had nothing to do with the design and execution of the study but use another group’s data for their own ends, possibly stealing from the research productivity planned by the data gatherers, or even use the data to try to disprove what the original investigators had posited. There is concern among some front-line researchers that the system will be taken over by what some researchers have characterized as “research parasites.””
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