Wednesday November 10, 2021; 12:07 PM EST
- I have been following Ben Thompson's thoughts on the Metaverse(s) on Stratechery for a while now (you should subscribe), and through that I have realized that all the big companies behind electronic medical records — EPIC and Cerner for sure, but others as well — are all trying to build a healthcare metaverse out of their products.#
- EPIC is the most egregious example: it wants to capture not only scheduling, billing, ordering, resulting, and documentation, but also communication all healthcare-related communication — between patients and providers, between different providers in the same institution, and between institutions. How is this different from what Satya Nadella showed is now possible in Microsoft Teams? (the whole presentation is here but Thompson linked to the relevant clip in his article on Microsoft and the Metaverse).#
- The future has first sneaked up on us and then engulfed us. With tele-visits being reimbursable c/o Covid-19, many physicians spend close to 50% of their patient interactions online. Even before the pandemic, physically interacting with patients and other providers was a minority of time spent on work for the non-procedural specialists. Would be nice to have data on how much time a rheumatologist spends physically interacting with the world nowadays, compared to time spent in the Healthcare Metaverse.#
- (I pulled the 50% out of thin air, in case you are wondering — data I have no time to look up now, but it should be in the right ballpark)#
- Sure, some if it is shifting goalposts for what the metaverse means — our VR future is not there yet — but our EMR overlords sure are looking more and more like Microsoft's definition of the metaverse, at least.#
- There was a slim chance that all of the components (billing, scheduling, etc…) could have been modular and interacted via standardized APIs. But it didn't work for the internet as a whole and it didn't work for electronic medical records.#
- With some luck, we'll get to reinvent the wheel and rebuild an open Metaverse once the closed ones start showing even more of their warts. It's RSS all the way down.#