So I'm doing my normal daily research and I come across one of my usual haunts HISTalk (according to the site owner most people pronounce it HIZZTALK while he prefers H-I-S talk. Go fig.). Anyway, there were two articles about money. In the first, a billionaire doctor Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong (No, not Noonien Soong, ‘Often Wrong' and no Commander Data jokes, please), offers his company NantHealth for IPO. He claims there is a $50 billion market opportunity, yet he's burned through $324 million already with no profit in sight. His other company, NantKWest is down 70% since it's IPO. Basically this guy is fabulously, filthy, stinking, F U RICH by offering ‘technology' to the healthcare industry that doesn't work. I'm pretty sure that the way he is connected and with the money he's raised, if his stuff had ANY redeeming value, the market would bow at his feet and lick his boot heels.

Another story (read it for yourself) on HISTalk was about a Cerner (I assume this is them, the site was down) implementation at a regional hospital in Vancouver, Nanaimo Regional General Hospital. This particular hospital spent $174 million on implementing Cerner. Implementing. Not writing, just implementing. After a year of testing they finally started up on March 19. After nine weeks the Emergency and ICU departments have gone back with paper records due to “our concern for patient safety.” Doctors complain that the system is slow, overly complicated and inefficient. “Tests are being delayed, Medications are being missed or accidentally discontinued.” Staff from Cerner itself was brought in to enter orders and even they made eight drug mistakes one day and ten the next.

Why do I bring all this up? Just like anything else, you can't just throw money at this problem. Sure there are people out there who will take every last red cent we can possibly toss their direction, but they have not and very obviously can not solve the problem. What we need is someone who isn't interested in the money, we need someone who is interested in saving lives. If Soon-Shiong was interested in saving lives, he'd be penniless sticking to his ideals while championing a company he really believed in, instead of his companies going down the toilet while he eats caviar and lights his cigars with hundred dollar bills. Likewise, if Cerner was really interested in anything but the almighty buck, they'd tuck their collective tail, refund Nanimo's money (the patients will end up footing that bill anyway) and start over and make a product that works as advertised.

So you were waiting on the plug. Here it is. We here at Sentia Health don't care about your money. We need enough to write the code that practitioners need to do their jobs and maintain the servers it runs on and maybe buy a pizza now and again. We see efficiencies in combining services so our insurance company gives the use of our Electronic Medical Records (EMR) management system away for free. If we do things the right way, the money will take care of itself. Cerner is an EMR. Cerner is not doing things the right way. I could build a jetliner for $175 million. Are they trying to tell me that setting up thier crappy software is worth more than an entire jetliner? How about a couple grand in setup fees per hostpital and then nothing else? Further, out of the $3 trillion Americans will spend on healthcare this year $1 trillion will be completely and unapologetically wasted by fat cat insurance companies. That $1 trillion doesn't include Soon-Shiong nor Cerner nor entities like them. We can replace that whole ugly mess with a pay per use fee of $10 per user per month. If there are 270,000,000 insured people in the United States (there are) and their insurance companies are wasting $1,000,000,000,000 (they are) that means that every insured person in the United states is paying over $3700 per year or about $310 per month average for health insurance. Let's get back to our original thesis: You can't solve this problem with money. You need smart, motivated people who care about making the world a better place, not cashing in. For the $174,000,000 that Nanaimo alone spent, we could automate most of the planet using a software generation tool built by our parent company Sentia Systems.

That $10 sounds pretty good now doesn't it?