by MATTHEW HOLT
Big news out of Mountain View, California today as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg announced that the social networking giant was going to formally enter the EMR business. Sandberg explained that Facebook already has all Americans and most of the world’s population on its system and that adding a little bit of information about their health would be trivial given that it’s easy with AR to abstract that information from their profiles, not to mention that everyone’s phone is already sending data back to Facebook.
In particular, Sandberg highlighted the fact that Facebook has already captured almost all the personal health information of many people with cancer and plenty of other rare diseases in the thousands of health communities that it has been pushing hard over the past few years. Not only have those individuals not known what Facebook is allowing third parties to do with that data, or which hackers have already stolen it in a SICGRL hack, but they have also found it impossible to extract themselves or their data from those groups. As Sandberg says “We already have the EMR business model down, now we just have to provide the products”
When it was pointed out to Sandberg that Facebook didn’t actually have any professional EMR tools that could be used by clinicians or doctors, a scruffily dressed guy hiding his bad haircut under a hoodie grabbed the mike and shouted “We’ve seen the schlock that Epic, Cerner and the rest put out–my wife has to use it and she spends every evening catching up on her data entry. Shouldn’t be too hard for our engineers to knock that off–just ask those guys at Snapchat.” Sandberg commented that while EMR vendors move slowly and break things, Facebook has shown over the years that it can do that much faster. “Have you seen what we did to American democracy or the EU?”
Later today Cerner stock was trading off 25%. When asked, an Epic spokesperson commented that even if you added their ages together, Sandberg and Zuckerberg were far too young to run a proper EMR company.
Matthew Holt is the Publisher of THCB
Categories: Health Tech
Gotcha!
I think I’ve just fallen for a slick Matthew Holt April Fools’ Day prank. I’m so stressed I don’t know what day it is.
As we all know, having the data does not make it useful for the iterative molding of a comprehensive care plan. The connection of an EMR and with an accounts receivable process creates an inexorable influence on its over-all structure and impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare.
What could possibly go wrong?