I would counter by saying software helps save lives when used dealing with medications. Knowing that Drug A + Drug B + Drug C = death is one thing keeping track that Doctor bob does not prescribe A and B, and then doctor Todd hands out Drug C is next to impossible when using paper records, unless the interaction is very well known.

The secret is finding a balance between when something is recorded and when it’s entered in a computer somewhere. While still pricy integrating a computer whiteboard with OCR let’s you mix physical and electronic records at the same time. You can even mix pen based solutions to do the same thing with paper copies. So while current solutions are horrible there it’s far from hopeless.

PS: Hospital software needs to cover a wide range of bases from billing to lawsuits which means it’s really hard to get right. But, just because it's been sold as enterprise software does not mean it's got to be terrible.