Typically the boring world of software isn’t a subject for Mother Jones, but electronic medical records somehow made the cut: “Epic Fail” talks about how six years and billions of dollars wasn’t enough to put medical data into a computerized database in a useful form. (Compare to the technological progress in the U.S. during the four years of World War II!)
[If Sheryl Sandberg and/or anyone from the New York Times had contributed, presumably the article would have pointed out that Judith Faulkner, the founder of Epic who has made almost $3 billion personally by selling American taxpayers software based on 50-year-old DBMS technology, could have been way richer if she had been a guy.]
What’s the return on our $35 billion investment as a society? “Doctors are investing the time to input data, but their offices are still having to fax and mail records like they did a decade ago.”
[Personally, I don’t think that it is fair to blame Epic that we chose to implement electronic medical records in the dumbest way possible. Nor is it Epic’s fault that there isn’t as much value in combining multiple individuals’ records in a single DBMS as there would be to combining those individuals’ banking records. I just think it is interesting that software is now important enough to be written about in a magazine that is about the “urgent issues of the day.”]
Interesting look at where the mandatory payments into the healthcare system are going, with their $35 billion auditorium, treehouse conference room, CEO who dresses in costumes, & Harry Potter inspired office buildings, all to produce absolutely nothing. The lavish, parallel universe of big healthcare that existed after the social security expansion of the 1980’s has grown spectacularly after the medicare expansions & shared responsibility payments of today.
When a common URL that might make Google $1 in self financed adsense income has the word healthcare in it, it’s suddenly worth $10,000 in the mind of the American voter, which they are all too willing to require you to pay.
Someday the story of how the VW diesel ” emissions cheating” software came to be written and how this cheating was not exposed for many years will make a very interesting read. There is a lot of very clever hacking software being written by the US intelligence services and by Russians and Chinese (some of whom are working for the government and some of whom are freelance) but we will probably never get to learn much about this stuff. But the VW stuff is going to be exposed at trial (I assume).
Speaking of clever hacking, in the past there were “ransomware” viruses that would appear to lock up your computer unless you paid the ransom to the Russian hackers who run these operations, but the lock screen was merely a facade and it was fairly easy to get rid of. However, nowadays, the ransomware encrypts your documents with high grade encryption software (off the shelf stuff, not anything original but still unbreakable if you are not the NSA) and unless you pay them the ransom in order to receive the encryption key, there is no way on earth to get your documents back. One more reason to do frequent backups.
Apparently the European diesel emissions control regime has been largely “They pretend to regulate and we pretend to comply” in an effort to favor diesel over gasoline fuel.
Andy Grove, founder of Intel, about a decade ago said that health care data is so messed up that the only way to fix it is to start with something embarrassingly simple.
The VW cheating was first and foremost aimed at the EPA in the US market. The EPA most certainly did not pretend to look the other way.
People wonder how we end up with oppressive bureaucracies that are a drag on business. THIS is how. The EPA relied on a certain level of good faith and honesty by the auto companies. Emissions certification was largely a self-certification process. For most of the industry this worked but the ONE bad apple spoils the whole barrel. You can be sure that in the future there will be a more oppressive protocol that does not permit self-certification.