Take a look at the major health care IT vendors. They're all working feverishly to collect, collate, process, and puree your health care information, billing codes, insurance carriers, hospitals, quality assurance mandates and red flags, etc.
To become our national health care IT system. To own it ALL!
Now look at the pacemaker industry in the US.
Three big companies. All promoting their pacemakers.
Each manufacturer's pacemaker computer is unique to their pacemaker models, but does the same job: they each "talk" to their respective pacemakers and tells them how fast or slow to go and how much energy to use to do the job safely. To do this, they use "protocols." Protocols are closely-guarded trade secrets.
And so as a fellow, when we did not know which manufacturer's pacemaker was installed in a patient's chest, I could not bring a single computer to talk to the pacemaker inside a particular patient. Instead, I had to push a huge cart carrying multiple computer programmers to the patient's bedside, each with their own special printer paper and programming heads, to interrogate the patient's pacemaker at their bedside.
Recall that the first pacemaker was developed in 1949. Since that time, the basic design and construct of pacemakers has become fairly standardized. Sixty years have passed. Today, do any of these pacemaker companies' computer systems talk to their competitors' pacemakers?
Of course not.
Share protocols? Are you crazy? That would compromise their intellectual property!
You see, it's really not about what's good for the patient or doctor.
It's about the money.