And yet every EMR system I've ever seen is comically bad. Why the medical providers haven't revolted over being forced to use those things is beyond me.
People outside healthcare really don't understand the sheer amount of time your physician spends trawling through the medical record in the regular course of doing his or her job. You can think of the patient chart as a shared "My Documents" folder on your computer. In modern multi-disciplinary care, you have many different parties taking care of the same patient and working in shifts. In order to get up to speed with what's happening for a particular patient, you need to open up each of the recent files in "My Documents" for that patient and review it. Lab results, progress notes, schedules, etc. Then repeat a couple dozen times for all the other patients you're caring for that day. Endless clicking. Constantly flipping between windows. Burn out.
That's not too much of an exaggeration of what the real EMR experience is like today.
Everything I've optimized really well was after a week or so using the old bad solution.
Programs made for me, to automate some part of my job? Invariably break some part of my workflow that promptly gets labeled an edge case.
Well, exactly. That's half of the reason why enterprise, medical, restaurant and other similar software generally sucks.
> Every developer should do customer service and a sales call on a regular basis.
In B2C, sure. In B2B for the examples I mentioned above, a "sales call" is where the problem starts. On such a call, you'll get the opinions of people paying for software, not of those using it.
In UK doctors are treated much worse than they are in the USA.
The worst was a thermostat.
Heaven help you if you ever lose the manual.
First: you're dealing with humans so you have to let a lot of things possible. Which is how you easily get shitty UI.
Second: everything is a legal horror. Certification, certification, certification.
PS: and third. Most medical software is not chosen by its users but by management.
There are many reasons for it, just as making software to manage restaurants has been an impossible one. The use cases are operationally extremely different in all cases.
That being said, doctors do not want tools that are clunky, tools that force them to change their existing workflows, tools that run slow, can't pull in relevant data in real-time, rely on fragile HL7 interfaces, etc. Doctors want tools that work for them. Doctors do not want to be fighting or struggling with tools that are supposed to help them. While that may seem obvious, it's a very difficult bar for most software makers to meet -- particularly in the inpatient and ED space.
I can understand the author's perspective -- she's a new resident at Yale New Haven Hospital and previously ran a medical software start-up that closed up shop relatively quickly. It would be convenient to rationalize the failure of her start-up due to fears of new tech. While it may have been a fear of new tech that prevented her start-up from succeeding, it was not a fear of being made obsolete -- it was a fear that her product wouldn't do the job well.