Category Archives: charts-and-graphs

Health IT’s ‘Thematic Wilderness’

Thomas Beale of the Good Electronic Health Record (GEHR) has an article that identifies problems of Health IT: ‘…

Those working in health IT do so in somewhat of a thematic `wilderness’, usually led by pioneers using an ad hoc
collection of available tools. Great progress can be made in this manner but it rarely leads to sustainable or
cooperative ventures. The software created, which is often inextricably linked to both particular technologies and data
models, does not generally communicate with other systems. Further, newer technologies make progressing the
previous work unattractive, resulting in systems which are maintained for a period and then discarded…
He goes on to say that a movement should occur from ‘isolated development to open development’ and details the basis for GEHR based on his reasoning.