Thanks Timothy. The desire to create interoperability and/or state/local exchanges is a very worthy one and one that should continue to be pursued. Our fear is that the politics and business interests are not necessarily aligned and will delay the ability to gain benefits from that type of data exchange.

So we’ve concluded that we just have to do the hard and messy work of replicating some of that effort in a low cost, but efficient and collaborative way where the physician, patient and insurer are aligned on the uses of the data, and mutual benefit of sharing that data.

I completely agree on the human element required to impact outcomes. We hear a lot about companies attempting to automate healthcare, I’m not really sure what is driving that motivation. We don’t really view automation and removing human interaction as a primary or logical goal, we feel the right framework is determining how do we improve decision making at that point of care (or determining “when that point of care should be”), and allow “humans” to make better decisions with better, more specific and accurate information. If eventually we determine that certain decisions are better made via automation, that’s something everyone should consider. But the first wave of that has and will occur in Radiology and Pathology (in my opinion), and over time move to other areas.