{"id":4568,"date":"2013-02-20T16:41:51","date_gmt":"2013-02-20T20:41:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=4568"},"modified":"2013-02-20T16:41:51","modified_gmt":"2013-02-20T20:41:51","slug":"health-care-it-industry-profits-from-crony-capitalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/20\/health-care-it-industry-profits-from-crony-capitalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Health care IT industry profits from crony capitalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times published an article<\/a> yesterday about how people who donated money to senators and election-related groups such as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee earned billions of dollars in additional profits from selling software that typically has few benefits for patients or society (see this January posting<\/a>).<\/p>\n

In that January posting<\/a> I talked about how a system such as Google Docs would deliver, for free, most of the benefits of the systems for which our society is now spending tens of billions of dollars. One of my spies within Google sent me the following email in response:<\/p>\n

In the days immediately after the Haiti earthquake there was a severe\u00a0problem around collecting basic patient information and\u00a0records… folks were getting moved between medical camps, doctors were\u00a0moving around, all sorts of workers from different non-profits were\u00a0helping out in different areas with no information sharing standards.\u00a0Frequently patients would go to different doctors and due to the lack\u00a0of infrastructure – buildings, power, etc., there were basically no\u00a0medical records or patient histories being collected ever, which\u00a0caused problems if one doctor prescribed medicine and then the patient\u00a0went to another doctor, lots of wasted effort collecting the same\u00a0information every time a patient came in, etc.<\/p>\n

Anyway the google.org engineers came up with a total hack that they\u00a0wanted to try out – create a Google Apps for Business domain, stick\u00a0every doctor and nurse into it with an account, and then setup an\u00a0enormous domain-wide shared Google Docs folder where anyone could put\u00a0patient histories. Each patient history would be a single doc with the\u00a0patient’s name and everything was appended as text. They thought the\u00a0cell network could be kept up and running on generators so they made a\u00a0really simple iPhone app (at the time very few doctors were using\u00a0Android) that used the Docs APIs to make it a little bit easier\u00a0to find patient records and append text to them.<\/p>\n

They got the whole thing working in a couple of days; I don’t know how\u00a0widely it was deployed, I was only involved briefly at the beginning\u00a0when they needed to figure out how to set up the domain and provision\u00a0users and came to the Enterprise team with questions. It was\u00a0interesting how the requirements affected their design – because of\u00a0the totally absurd time-crunch – people were dying and they needed to\u00a0make efficient use of the doctors – basically all the requirements\u00a0around privacy of information, structured records, limiting who can\u00a0see whose data and keeping audit trails, etc – went out the window.\u00a0And once they were gone it was actually a really easy system to build\u00a0and deploy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is a little bit interesting that the New York Times never loses its enthusiasm for Big Government. They publish articles lauding proposals by politicians to spend billions in taxpayer money on something that is supposed to do a lot of good. Then a year later the newspaper will publish an article about how great it is that the do-gooding is actually happening. Then a year or two later the newspaper will do a follow-up about how much or most of the money turned out to be wasted, funneled into the pockets of cronies, etc. These cycles continue, usually about 50 of them in parallel, without the Times ever running an article on how government spending tends to be wasteful and to result in the enrichment of cronies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times published an article yesterday about how people who donated money to senators and election-related groups such as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee earned billions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nHealth care IT industry profits from crony capitalism - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/20\/health-care-it-industry-profits-from-crony-capitalism\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Health care IT industry profits from crony capitalism - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The New York Times published an article yesterday about how people who donated money to senators and election-related groups such as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee earned billions […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/20\/health-care-it-industry-profits-from-crony-capitalism\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-02-20T20:41:51+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"philg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"philg\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/20\/health-care-it-industry-profits-from-crony-capitalism\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/20\/health-care-it-industry-profits-from-crony-capitalism\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"philg\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/448e4e6a0ae9105741a06dcf62cee50e\"},\"headline\":\"Health care IT industry profits from crony capitalism\",\"datePublished\":\"2013-02-20T20:41:51+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/20\/health-care-it-industry-profits-from-crony-capitalism\/\"},\"wordCount\":587,\"commentCount\":14,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/448e4e6a0ae9105741a06dcf62cee50e\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/20\/health-care-it-industry-profits-from-crony-capitalism\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/20\/health-care-it-industry-profits-from-crony-capitalism\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/20\/health-care-it-industry-profits-from-crony-capitalism\/\",\"name\":\"Health care IT industry profits from crony capitalism - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2013-02-20T20:41:51+00:00\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/20\/health-care-it-industry-profits-from-crony-capitalism\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/20\/health-care-it-industry-profits-from-crony-capitalism\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/20\/health-care-it-industry-profits-from-crony-capitalism\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Health care IT industry profits from crony capitalism\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\",\"description\":\"A posting every day; 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