I work for a division of a health tech company and I can say that we hear you and value this kind of feedback. There are folks I work with who have dedicated themselves (including myself) to seek solutions to problems like these, and as a former integrations engineer, some companies are better at interoperability than others, despite the efforts of the HITECH Act in the US. My frustration is time and getting the attention of those who greenlight projects to work on things like these.
On one hand, I feel OSS could help solve these problems sooner, but on the other hand, healthcare has some very opinionated people and things could get messy.
I have a random suggestion that might be a little more useful/unique than my bitching above, (which you’ve probably heard a few thousand times already…)
One area that’s lacking in EVERY program I’ve used for charting is education. We get nursing students pretty regularly, as have the previous hospitals I’ve worked at (guessing this is pretty universal - where there are nursing positions, there are nursing schools fighting over clinical slots). When I was in school, we were given access to real patient’s charts during clinicals, and we spent a lot of time doing things like sitting at the nursing station and staring at a computer monitor at lists of lab values/meds/vitals trends/etc and whipping a pen out and transposing that shit onto paper so we could take it home and write a care plan from it. Patient data could be printed, but doing so was forbidden by the school program, because HIPAA - and understandably so, given the legal ramifications for fucking that up. Even copying the data into a word doc and manually omitting names and such was still hard no for the same reason - we might miss something and accidentally violate HIPAA.
So, the idea this is all leading up to: in the ‘View’ tab or something, make an option for “student view” that pulls up a plain text summary of the patient – but without any PHI. Anything entered into a patient’s name field will output as “PATIENT”; staff entered will just be “DOCTOR, DOCTOR2, NURSE, TECH” etc. Patient’s age? Round to the nearest 5. Dates? Fudge all of them by a random number of days (RNG on generating a report) , but by a consistent amount for all dates in that report, ie real admission date of Dec 3 2025 and discharge date of Dec 5 2025 --> RNG applies -42 days --> Student View summary reports Admission at Oct 22 2025, and discharge at Oct 24 2025. Labs? Fudge it by RNG with +/- 1% of real value.
You get the gist.
Give me a report that’s useless as fuck for the real patient - no PHI at all. BUT, you’ve essentially just generated a completely fake patient with useful data for a case study. In the student’s mind, there’s no difference - “PATIENT, 75, MALE, hospitalized for 2 days” is effectively the same case study as “Leeroy Jenkins, 73, Male, hospitalized on these specific dates, 2 days apart”. Slightly tweaked labs? who gives a shit, all they care about is if they’re out of range by a clinically significant margin.
And here’s a golden bit: PRINT THAT SUMBICH!! Or fuck it, email the .txt to your student email so you can copy and paste it. There’s no HIPAA, so it doesn’t matter. What matters is the student isn’t wasting their clinical hours fucking around on a computer - get their ass into a patient room where they can do some nursing, cuz they’ll learn more there than the entire rest of the degree program. They can crunch the data for a care plan at home.
…that ended up being really wordy. Sorry about the wall of text. On the off chance anything comes of it, let me know!
There’s none that I’m aware of that basically anonymizes patient data for use outside of healthcare.
Billing and insurance all falls under HIPAA - those facets and every other aren’t disallowed (legally) from things like printing sensitive info - basically if it’s being used as part of your care, it’s fine.
And students are no exception - when they’re on a clinical rotation, they’re on that patient’s healthcare team and can legally access and print etc that info. The problem is that students still need that data for use outside of that care, and HIPAA doesn’t give a fuck about their homework, so any papers that have PHI on it become a violation when they start being accessed for those things. And schools don’t trust students not to fuck that up, so they’ll come up with overkill-by-design policies like disallowing students from printing PHI, even if it’s for use on that clinical and meant to be shredded before leaving. So, the school wants to play things extra safe.
…this isn’t to say that insurance companies aren’t abusing your data, but can legally handle it within the scope of your billing.
I work for a division of a health tech company and I can say that we hear you and value this kind of feedback. There are folks I work with who have dedicated themselves (including myself) to seek solutions to problems like these, and as a former integrations engineer, some companies are better at interoperability than others, despite the efforts of the HITECH Act in the US. My frustration is time and getting the attention of those who greenlight projects to work on things like these. On one hand, I feel OSS could help solve these problems sooner, but on the other hand, healthcare has some very opinionated people and things could get messy.
I have a random suggestion that might be a little more useful/unique than my bitching above, (which you’ve probably heard a few thousand times already…)
One area that’s lacking in EVERY program I’ve used for charting is education. We get nursing students pretty regularly, as have the previous hospitals I’ve worked at (guessing this is pretty universal - where there are nursing positions, there are nursing schools fighting over clinical slots). When I was in school, we were given access to real patient’s charts during clinicals, and we spent a lot of time doing things like sitting at the nursing station and staring at a computer monitor at lists of lab values/meds/vitals trends/etc and whipping a pen out and transposing that shit onto paper so we could take it home and write a care plan from it. Patient data could be printed, but doing so was forbidden by the school program, because HIPAA - and understandably so, given the legal ramifications for fucking that up. Even copying the data into a word doc and manually omitting names and such was still hard no for the same reason - we might miss something and accidentally violate HIPAA.
So, the idea this is all leading up to: in the ‘View’ tab or something, make an option for “student view” that pulls up a plain text summary of the patient – but without any PHI. Anything entered into a patient’s name field will output as “PATIENT”; staff entered will just be “DOCTOR, DOCTOR2, NURSE, TECH” etc. Patient’s age? Round to the nearest 5. Dates? Fudge all of them by a random number of days (RNG on generating a report) , but by a consistent amount for all dates in that report, ie real admission date of Dec 3 2025 and discharge date of Dec 5 2025 --> RNG applies -42 days --> Student View summary reports Admission at Oct 22 2025, and discharge at Oct 24 2025. Labs? Fudge it by RNG with +/- 1% of real value.
You get the gist.
Give me a report that’s useless as fuck for the real patient - no PHI at all. BUT, you’ve essentially just generated a completely fake patient with useful data for a case study. In the student’s mind, there’s no difference - “PATIENT, 75, MALE, hospitalized for 2 days” is effectively the same case study as “Leeroy Jenkins, 73, Male, hospitalized on these specific dates, 2 days apart”. Slightly tweaked labs? who gives a shit, all they care about is if they’re out of range by a clinically significant margin.
And here’s a golden bit: PRINT THAT SUMBICH!! Or fuck it, email the .txt to your student email so you can copy and paste it. There’s no HIPAA, so it doesn’t matter. What matters is the student isn’t wasting their clinical hours fucking around on a computer - get their ass into a patient room where they can do some nursing, cuz they’ll learn more there than the entire rest of the degree program. They can crunch the data for a care plan at home.
…that ended up being really wordy. Sorry about the wall of text. On the off chance anything comes of it, let me know!
So there’s no software to do what literally every insurance swears they don’t break the law doing en masse?
There’s none that I’m aware of that basically anonymizes patient data for use outside of healthcare.
Billing and insurance all falls under HIPAA - those facets and every other aren’t disallowed (legally) from things like printing sensitive info - basically if it’s being used as part of your care, it’s fine.
And students are no exception - when they’re on a clinical rotation, they’re on that patient’s healthcare team and can legally access and print etc that info. The problem is that students still need that data for use outside of that care, and HIPAA doesn’t give a fuck about their homework, so any papers that have PHI on it become a violation when they start being accessed for those things. And schools don’t trust students not to fuck that up, so they’ll come up with overkill-by-design policies like disallowing students from printing PHI, even if it’s for use on that clinical and meant to be shredded before leaving. So, the school wants to play things extra safe.
…this isn’t to say that insurance companies aren’t abusing your data, but can legally handle it within the scope of your billing.
tell me you work with clinicians without telling me.
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