[adolph]

As someone working in this arena, I offer an alternative perspective for your consideration: healthcare was an early adopter of information technology and as a result many of its most core technologies come from a nearly unrecognizable time in computing. These systems are “outdated” as a result of success.

The current prevalence of these venerable technologies may be in part due to regulation, but more often has to do with their success.

HL7v2 is just token delimited ascii. Not unlike the similarly primitive but ubiquitous csv. The fields within it are defined by standards documents and once you use it a little, you can read enough to get the gist of most messages. As you might guess, modules in your language of choice are used to parse and compose HL7v2 so its detail isn’t that important.

[Edit: looks like the project has written Synthea out in favor of an integrated data generator]

Something I’d like to point out about Google Hospital is that under the hood it uses MITRE’s Synthea to generate synthetic patient data.

https://www.healthcareittoday.com/2017/09/13/open-source-too...

https://synthetichealth.github.io/synthea/

[dalbasal]

That's a thoughtful perspective.

It's also useful for expecting similar in future industries. Ultimately, I think it doesn't even matter if the reason is regulatory complexity, industry rigidity, or technical debt.

The question is how do we dig out of such holes.

If we were starting from scratch, it's almost certain we'd have better software, better firms, norms, standards and such within a short period of time.

How do we do that when not starting from scratch?