Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I'm understanding your question correctly, the single biggest obstacle in healthcare informatics today is interoperability. The industry grew up in a pretty ad hoc way and the result is that closed-off silos of data are pretty much the norm; every vendor has their own ideas about how data should be handled, and getting different systems talking to each other is a full-time job (my job, coincidentally). HITECH and…
I agree. Integration is exceedingly complex. Data is stored and interpreted differently in every system, even if they share the same EMR, due to configuration differences in workflow, data setup, software versions, etc. You can't exchange data without thoroughly understanding the clinic workflows that generated it or will be using it. It's all time-consuming and hard. I work on a patient portal consuming data from th…
The irony being that those tightly inegrated solutions tend to be some of the worst offenders in terms of being a nightmare for interop and walled-off silos. But they're popular because the pieces they do offer generally work.
And totally agree that the opportunity is there for highly targeted applications that cater to specific healthcare niches because the downside of the huge top-down systems is the fact that they're more generalized. But you have to be able to integrate them into that larger EMR environment for them to be realistically useful.
That said, the facility I'm at now (midsize, ~400 beds) took a best-of-breed approach and... well, there's a reason I say current interop is bad. It's appealing on the clinical side because groups like surgery or the ED or even endo get to run software designed to cater specifically to their needs, but the backend integration ends up being a huge exercise every time anything changes.
