I work for a company that has been trying to do something like this for at least a decade. Nurses and doctors are extremely reluctant to change - especially when it comes to something as important as ptient records. This is for various reasons (#1 being that no vendor has really tried to do it correctly), but by now the healthcare market is so set in their ways that it's going to take more than Obama's money and some Apple engineering to pull off the change.
The problem is that no one offers a complete system that "just works" from end to end. Think of how easy it is to sit down at a Mac and figure out how you get on the web and print a document. That same ease of use needs to apply to the entire patient monitoring chain: data acquisition, patient records, ICU visits, etc. Right now the market is saturated with companies too lazy to do it all themselves so they buy smaller companies that have done each piece well and spend billions and years trying to integrate it all. There is huge money spent, but only because the system has no other choice.
It would be a great sector for startups if you knew how to deal with the FDA.
The problem is that no one offers a complete system that "just works" from end to end. Think of how easy it is to sit down at a Mac and figure out how you get on the web and print a document. That same ease of use needs to apply to the entire patient monitoring chain: data acquisition, patient records, ICU visits, etc. Right now the market is saturated with companies too lazy to do it all themselves so they buy smaller companies that have done each piece well and spend billions and years trying to integrate it all. There is huge money spent, but only because the system has no other choice.
It would be a great sector for startups if you knew how to deal with the FDA.