After your undergraduate technical degree (EE, CE, CS, etc) get an MPH or an MS in Informatics, and look for an IT job in health care. Health care may be the most under automated sector of the economy. There is a groundswell of need at the small offices where 60% of health care takes place. These are the sites that are seriously under-automated. Check out the American Medical Informatics Association's 10x10 program (http://www.amia.org/10x10/), which seeks to graduate 10,000 new informaticians within the next 4 years to handle the growing need for automation in health care. If you don't have time for a degree, then just hit Sourceforge and join one of the dozens of open source projects developing the next generation of solutions for small medical practices (FreeMed, ClearHealth, OpenEMR, OpenHRE, OpenEHR, etc.). Or visit the openhealth listserv (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/openhealth/) to check out the global open source health care software discussion.
There is no need for a national patient identifier. The charming PR announcement from the "Tech Giants" may seem shallow, but the Connecting For Health project represents thousands of hours of development work towards an open, Public Domain interconnected health records exchange solution, including solutions to correlate an identity in an openly federated environment. If you drill down into the details, the emerging national standards focus on a federated solution, with no requirement for a national health identifier. Two collaborating open source projects have made substantial progress towards federated identity correlation: http://openemed.org/ and http://openhre.org/. -- [wr]
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http://sourceforge.net/projects/tolven
After your undergraduate technical degree (EE, CE, CS, etc) get an MPH or an MS in Informatics, and look for an IT job in health care. Health care may be the most under automated sector of the economy. There is a groundswell of need at the small offices where 60% of health care takes place. These are the sites that are seriously under-automated. Check out the American Medical Informatics Association's 10x10 program (http://www.amia.org/10x10/), which seeks to graduate 10,000 new informaticians within the next 4 years to handle the growing need for automation in health care. If you don't have time for a degree, then just hit Sourceforge and join one of the dozens of open source projects developing the next generation of solutions for small medical practices (FreeMed, ClearHealth, OpenEMR, OpenHRE, OpenEHR, etc.). Or visit the openhealth listserv (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/openhealth/) to check out the global open source health care software discussion.
There is no need for a national patient identifier. The charming PR announcement from the "Tech Giants" may seem shallow, but the Connecting For Health project represents thousands of hours of development work towards an open, Public Domain interconnected health records exchange solution, including solutions to correlate an identity in an openly federated environment. If you drill down into the details, the emerging national standards focus on a federated solution, with no requirement for a national health identifier. Two collaborating open source projects have made substantial progress towards federated identity correlation: http://openemed.org/ and http://openhre.org/. -- [wr]