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Heroic investigations of life and disease have put us on the verge of a health-care revolution. Meanwhile, the software industry is booming; tech startups appear faster than you can say “medical informatics.” But at the intersection of these two complex fields lies dysfunction. Researchers and clinicians, shackled to software that no one in their right mind would use voluntarily, spend countless hours manually copying data from one system to another. And this separation of software development from clinical research is costing lives.
When paper records predominated in medicine, research assistants or medical students manually screened health records for certain diagnoses or laboratory values that would qualify patients for prospective clinical trials. Upon identifying suitable trial candidates and receiving their consent, researchers manually extracted the data ...
