Frequently on this blog, I refer to "Belling the Cat." What I mean by that is a bunch of self-important people sitting around trying to solve a problem they don't understand using methods that may as well be magic. Arthur C. Clarke states in his third law "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." We prefer "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice (Grey's law; compare Hanlon's razor)." Recently in these very pages we lambasted Dr. Karen DeSalvo, The Acting Assistant Secretary for Health, HHS, for saying 'we are doing this and we are doing that and we need these things to happen and these good things are happening,' while she has no idea what is happening, who is doing them, and how they are getting done. This is precisely how we end up in some technological dead end tunnel like we did with HL7. A bunch of doctors who know nothing about technology get together in the 60s and come up with this marvelous protocol that doesn't work. The cheapest way to hack around it is to call Iguana and have them decode the first five ‘channels' of your HL7 message for around $20,000, last time I checked. In the tech world, we use several methods to get this same thing accomplished, the most prevalent is XML which is free and works just fine for transferring data in a file in an platform agnostic kind of way.

Why do I bring all this up? All of these problems have been solved elegantly and simply and if you've been following along, you've seen lots of the solutions. We, collectively, feel a little like Leonard (yes Hofstadter, from The Big Bang Theory, sue me for using pop culturing my simile) when confronted by Jimmy Speckerman. Jimmy has an idea to build glasses that turn regular movies into 3D movies. Of course this is impossible but Jimmy is so ignorant of science that he doesn't realize that you can't manufacture information that just isn't there. This is how I see the Medical/Insurance/Health IT/Government bumbling about and doing things. They are just like Clarke's villagers. When they need magic, they call a magician and expect miracles (and complain when they don't get them).

We here at Sentia not only have these problems solved, elegantly and simply, we have EXECUTED the plans to build them and actually produced the solution.

Interoperability.

Cutting the cost of healthcare by 1/3.

Streamlining the insurance process.

Emailing your doctor.

Eliminating paper with doctor configurable questionnaires.

Getting rid of the extra expense of medical coding.

We belled the cat. Literally.