[stickfigure]

> It bears questioning how, in ”the richest country on Earth”, something as important as a hospital ends up held together with spit and twine.

In less rich countries they use paper records, which are worse. Everything is held together with spit and twine.

[soco]

There's a lot of this concept, that if it doesn't work in the US, everybody else must have failed even worse. Well, not really, many times it's actually the other way around. I won't bother with other more obvious examples but in this context, even Pakistan has a digital health system in the meantime.

[ClumsyPilot]

You could consider the fact that many countries have instant bank payments, ipV6 networks, better residential internet, have chip & pin and 10x less credit card fraud, have better justice system (lower recidivism, verdict is not determined by your wealth, etc), don't have the 'social security number is an identity', etc..

Of course many countries are worse, but surely you want to look at successes of others and replicate them.

[grecy]

I honestly think it's because Americans are told from birth they live in "The greatest country in the world". In that context, it feels like trying to fix anything is not really a worthy pursuit, because it's already better than everywhere else anyway. So even if healthcare sucks, it's better than everywhere else. (Which everyone in a developed country knows first hand is simply not true)

I personally think it's a very dangerous thing to believe, because it means there's no driving force to improve, and it's a part of the reason the country has stagnated so badly.

[stickfigure]

My wife did part of her nursing program in St Kitts. They used paper records.

She also says that, of the half-dozen medical record systems she has used (here in the US), Epic is one of the better ones. (read: least bad)

I'm sure if you talked to medical professionals in Pakistan they would bemoan their medical record system too. It seems to be popular sport in the medical community.

[badpun]

Nope, they just use a single national health insurer instead of many private ones. This changes the problem from many-to-many (as is in the US) to just many-to-one, which is immensely simpler.

[Tade0]

Not necessarily true. At least all my medical records in all the facilities I visited in the last 5 years were digitized and I live in an eastern European, post-communist country.