[andrewthornton]

You should take a quick look at EPIC. They dominate the electronic heath record space, and a ton of health systems use it. You will know if your doctor's office uses an EHR application, because they will be typing notes into it for the majority of your visit. I have not been too excited about the amount of time that physicians spend on EHR systems, but I am hopeful that taking the data they input (along with blood work and other test results) will make everything more accurate, fast and effective.

[jonathan-adly]

EPIC unfortunately is all the bad things about Google, and none of the good.

Unable to ship anything, protect their margin > help the users solve problems, monopoly, locked up distribution so no one else can innovate.

Honestly, my bear case for AI in medicine is Epic picking up the phone and telling health-systems not to buy anything because they are working on something for them for free. (Which would be some note completion BS stuff, rather than actual clinical support that helps patients and cuts costs). They may be doing this already.

[MavisBacon]

I spent a few weeks at an MGH affiliate hospital that had since my last stay began using Epic and from what I could tell all it did was muddy things up. The staff all seemed to fumble through use of the interface, even those who had spent years with it. From the nurses to the medical director of this particular program, everyone was always complaining about using the software

As a patient I never really set eyes on the interface but there seems to be a UX nightmare afoot. Once I was unintentionally dispensed 3x the intended dose of a stimulant medication due to a “default dose” feature in the interface that my physician admitted to accidentally submitting based on

[coredog64]

Training a model on an EHR is worse than nothing. Epic allows infinite customization, and customers build up their own informal standards such that you can’t dump and compare data across multiple sites.

[accrual]

While it's not easy or simple for every facility, in general it seems to be possible to pull whatever data you want from Epic and other EHRs. There might be a fee, work order, and vendor involved, but if you want a 100GB CSV containing certain columns, it's generally possible.

Of course matching that data up with sets from other locations will still involve someone in the middle gluing it all together.