Halle Tecco: Lack of Interoperability as Market Failure

So a friend of mine was actually being treated for what they thought was a brain tumor here at Stanford Hospital. A few months into her treatment, she actually fell into a coma while she was at home in San Francisco. We called an ambulance, and they took her to the nearest hospital, which was ucsf, and it was a Friday. Now, UCSF and Stanford are really the two leading hospitals in the world. They're 35 miles from each other in the heart of Silicon Valley, in the innovation epicenter of the world. And in 2012, UCSF spent $160 million on a new medical record system with a company in this space called Epic. Stanford actually uses that same exact software to manage the medical records on their campus. Despite all of this, UCSF was unable to obtain her medical files outlining her condition, her. Her latest MRI results, and other health details for four days. It was the weekend, and there was no human being to transfer this vital information 35 miles. UCSF had no choice but to run the tests again. I tell this story because a lot of the problems in health care are not technology problems. I wish they were technology problems because there are a lot of really smart technologists. But the technology to remotely share health records is not novel. It's not a groundbreaking technology. It's a systemic problem. We treat medical records as though they were Stanford's property, not the patient's property. There was no financial disincentive or penalty for Stanford not to share those records. And UCSF actually made more money by being able to run those tests. Again, there is an incentive problem for providers not to be interoperable, and that's truly a market failure.