Work on interesting problems. Not interesting tech

Faxes are common in healthcare, and it's a common punch line from newcomers. But there's a series of standards that have been iterated on since the late 80s/early 90s that are finally getting to a place where they can eliminate faxes. There's standards for how to transmit data between EHRs, standards for how to store and represent data, and a standard API for 3rd parties to be able to write/read that data.

Regardless of these standards, you can already share data between hospitals using the same EHR -- so epic-to-epic (epic is the largest EHR vendor in the US) data sharing has been happening for a decade without any faxes. Unfortunately, there's a ton of different players in this game, so getting to a place where everyone has adopted the standards takes a long time, and the system still needs to keep running while this switch happens. To be clear, this is a common problem throughout tech: is it possible to run a native android app on iPhone? Do you think Google and Apple will ever make it possible to do that?

I can think of at least one medical company that builds their own technology and managed to paint themselves into a corner by not working from within the system. They just hire a bunch of engineers, who hear about how faxes run healthcare, so they say "cool, I can digitize the faxes" without bothering to consider or learn about other standards that are being developed. This leads to proprietary data models, with proprietary data representation, all transmitted using outdated technology. The engineers quit and go back to non-health tech, and tell their friends that health tech is so frustrating because it's so dated (make sure to bring your fax machine when you start your new job!).

But, really, the problem was never faxes. The problem is that healthcare is way more complicated, with way more stakeholders than consumer tech. You can't just launch a new product and iterate on the bugs later; people's lives are at stake, so the whole industry is heavily regulated. But if you enter with humility, recognizing that there is too much information for one person to know, but know that your skills are welcomed and needed. Take time to learn about things like HL7, FHIR, and clinical ontologies. And partner-- not just a quick knowledge sharing session-- actually partner with the domain experts, then there's a whole world of fascinating possibility out there.

I have a brick and mortar small business that takes appointments, have monthly recurring services and did not use Square appointments. We did everything manually to handle calendar appointments, invoice, charging for payments. Found out after a few months the time is not worth the savings and rather just get a service like Square. I thought maybe his client was the same and was trying to help.

But hey maybe Square was very obvious for your brick and mortar service based business and I'm one of the few "ignorant and stupid one".