There’s some good news for EMR software. Box, a cloud storage and information-sharing platform used in many different industries, released a statement on Thursday, saying that they acquired an “ecosystem” of app companies and are actively expanding their healthcare offerings.
One of Box’s efforts is to create a downloadable Personal Health Record that aggregates multiple inputs. Basically they want consumers to carry around a digital medical file to take to different specialists. A few of the new companies they acquired focus on text transmission, so its presumed they want to help doctors text information more effectively, too—X-rays, notes, files and the like.
As we know, building HIPAA-approved EMR software has given developers headaches. According to a related article some of Box’s apps have succeeded in getting HIPAA-approval. But Missy Krasner (who was hired from Google Health, a failed platform, to run Box’s healthcare expansion) admitted that “EHRs are not good workflow management tools, they’re recording tools.”
Keep in mind that concierge medicine has a huge advantage over the behemoth insurance-tied healthcare industry. We can build our own software from scratch. And we don’t need HIPAA-approval. It’s always refreshing to see humans achieving technical wins. But there’s an irony when insurance companies and government regulation erected the hurdle in the first place.
As this is a complex development, reading the complete article is recommended. Box distributed a press release with more details as well.