[opportune]

Apple and Samsung entering the healthcare space to compete with Epic (their name isn't all-caps) and Cerner, in reality, is going to be closer to this: https://xkcd.com/927/

Most of the employees at Epic and Cerner in the healthcare space are actually operations. Like, at least 60% of their workers are operations. Not only that, but they're not traditional IT workers who go out and get certs, they're really closer to devops professionals who are able to provide both IT support and have an intimate understanding of what they're working with. Last time I checked, Apple and Samsung don't really even have this tier of customer facing support. It's going to take organizational shifts for them to break into this sector, and it's not so sure a thing.

That said, I completely agree with your observation that hospitals need to become tech companies. My parents are medical professionals and I have also worked at a medical software company in the past, so I think I'm pretty well grounded when it comes to saying this: hospitals hate developers, and developers hate hospitals. From the perspective of the hospital worker, developers make overly confusing systems and as soon as the worker gets used to it, they completely change everything and make it even more complicated than before. From the perspective of developers, most hospital professionals are luddites who oppose all change and progress as a matter of principle. If the two roles were more closely integrated, these severe communication issues would be mitigated. Medicine needs to be redesigned form the ground up with these two fields learning each others' skills and understanding how and why the other field does what it does.

[mxwll]

Fair points - I don't believe that Apple / Samsung are necessarily going to build out their own EMR systems. Rather I think the bottom up approach they are taking by creating an enormous amount of personal health data -- heart rate and exercise activity now with a growing ecosystem of third party devices -- that is up to FHIR specs is a step in the right direction.

Your second point really resonates with me. I have spent the last few months working within a large healthcare organization and it is extremely difficult to make necessary changes. There is a lot of distrust of our team to the point of hostility. Very frustrating