leeharris100

Not Bill Gates obviously, but I was the VP of Engineering for a healthcare software company until about a year ago when I resigned out of frustration (and now I hold the same position at a music company, 100x better!).

Basically the system in its current incarnation makes a ton of money and it's a relatively "easy" system for the doctors / healthcare owners. They make enough money through the insane costs to pay others to do all the "tedious" tasks that most software automates.

Our product would basically do a huge data search on opt-in patients, give them personal quizzes broken down into small questions per day, and we'd have subtle depression screenings that you couldn't tell were depression screenings (most elderly people don't self medicate because they are depressed and won't admit it). It would then automatically apply certain actions to help them self-medicate and it would send notes / make suggestions for the doctors/nurses in the system. It was incredible tech with a huge machine learning backend, had the potential to help save tons of lives.

And every single time I'd go meet with a healthcare system, their executives first and only question was, "how can this save us money?" I'd look around at their new $20 million dollar office, the executive's several thousand dollar suits, and just wonder, "why in the hell do they need more money?"

When I'd go visit the sites where people's EHR (electronic health records) data was stored, they'd have ancient hardware running in basements plugged into 5 daisy chained surge protectors. It's completely insane. There are no standards to anything, no universally stored data, and nobody's EHR/EMR systems are compatible.

There are entire companies like redox who do nothing other than normalize data from healthcare systems and send it through APIs. To get your software to plug into just 1 EMR/EHR system is $500 per month minimum (can easily get into $50k/month for complicated ones). Considering there are literally hundreds of EMR/EHR systems out there, you can see how making a compatible product can be insanely expensive. This makes innovation expensive and unlikely.

And it's because the system is for-profit. Just like we're seeing now in late stage capitalism in general, lots of companies are running out of ways to squeeze money out of people. They've been slowly taking every penny they can, and now finally they are just cutting out as much as they can while trying to maintain the status quo.

Until healthcare has motivations that go beyond money, we will NEVER have the medical technology we need or deserve.

To be honest, I think most of the problem is the new menu. It's clearly an "appeal to the masses and make cheap food" type of menu. I know that you're just running PR and damage control by saying you were trying to "improve" the menu, but a lot of your target audience is smart enough to not be fooled.

Believe me when I say that I understand your position as well. Running a business is expensive and efficiency is important. The food, however, was a BIG part of Alamo Drafthouse and now it's become a nice movie theater with food worse than TGIF or Chili's (though that baked pretzel with queso is AMAZING). I think you'll be able to find a middle ground though.

I still love Alamo and will continue to go as long as the core values stay the same, but there are plenty of competitors popping up which look more appealing every day.

Also, thanks for starting this trend in the first place.

It is theft. I have friends who own a video game store and LAN center. They don't bother calling the cops anymore when things get stolen. If the police manage to find it or the person brings it back, the police show up, take it as "evidence," and they never get it back. They've lost literally thousands of dollars in games and systems this way. This is in a middle-upper class area too.

There's probably a whole room of fat asshole cops laughing while playing COD on all the stuff they stole from my friends' store.

So I've wondered for a long time, why don't hospitals offer money to donors to encourage donating incredibly important stuff like this?

Seems odd to me that our entire healthcare system in the US is built for profit, but they can't spare any money to encourage donors?

Or is there some kind of ethical / logistical reason we can't do this?