Thanks for the information. I work as a software developer myself on cloud services and applications, and I have briefly worked in healthcare IT in the past on a small project for tracking home-care services in Boston. Just from what I have learned first-hand and from people I know who are deeply rooted in the industry as experts in various specialties, the challenge of modernizing and standardizing healthcare is great and will require widespread adoption of more open-minded thinking and better tools / processes.

The amount of people in healthcare who use Access in production alone is an alarming example of the state of things. There are endless free tools ranging from PostgreSQL to your flavor of choice for implementing REST APIs and UIs on whatever target device or screen geometry you can dream of. There’s no reason to use Access for anything other than education (or maybe keeping a record of your book collection for fun or some other trivial case). The tools and knowledge are freely available for anyone with a computer and access to the internet, and there are many turnkey solutions available already that can improve operations greatly, so now’s a good time to start implementing change and moving towards adoption of well-defined standards.