Re:Performance Matters
by Ensorceled on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @06:23AM
(#20745314)
It's the procurment process and the lack of skilled management. With the Ontario eHealth debacle[1], the people in charge were hospital administrators with no software project experience. They were taken advantage of by the contractors, their employees and, to be fair, their own greed. These kinds of large projects really need to spend the money on a real CTO and/or CPO.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EHealth_Ontario#Consulting_and...
A friend's sister is a doctor. We happened to be visiting her hospital the week they were rolling out a new system. If if I recall rightly, her hospital was part of a multi-hospital company, and they were developing it in house. The developers were in some location distant to the hospital, and my doctor pal had never met anybody who worked on it.
From my perspective, the thing was a disaster. Not only was it laggy as hell, but the interface was dumbfoundingly bad. For a doctor to prescribe something for a patient, the would have to pick the medication name from an absurdly long drop-down. Then they could type in a quantity and pick a unit from a pulldown that had mcg, mg, g, and kg choices. Once that was entered, it would show up on the reports nurses would use to give medication. However, they didn't have the field sizing right on the reports, so 100 mg would turn into 10 mg. It was only nurse experience that kept people from getting dangerously wrong doses of their medication.
The whole thing was hot garbage of exactly the sort made in a big waterfall process by developers who never met the users and never saw them in action. I'm sure every bit of it was technically to spec, but I'd be amazed if nobody died from it.