[notabee]

I just want to say that I'm happy to see one of y'all on here. If doctors and engineers were to collaborate together directly to fill in each others' domain knowledge gaps instead of buying crap software from companies with poor incentives, some truly amazing things could happen.

[TheCoelacanth]

I have a feeling it's more a case of misaligned incentives than just that people with the right knowledge are not involved. Medical professionals are certainly one set of stakeholders that EHR developers consider, but I'm almost certainly they aren't the ones given the highest priority. I would bet that billing, legal compliance and protection from accusations of malpractice are all given a higher priority than actually being able to effectively treat patients.

[JshWright]

It's not as uncommon as you think. I'm both a paramedic and a developer for an EHR, and we have a number of other medical professionals (including a physician) in various product related roles.

[notabee]

I know that EHR companies surely employ both engineers and medical professionals, but are they able to freely innovate and explore, or are they bound to top-down bureaucracy with, as another responder mentioned, misaligned incentives? The kind of thing that I imagine would be a fully open source, open standards implementation that could allow easy portability of records between all providers.