Thursday, October 18, 2012

HITECH and Experimental Airplanes

This from a commenter, who has been deeply involved in major governmental health IT initiatives in another land, who wishes to remain anonymous:

The whole HITECH initiative really is getting like the equivalent of loading up a brand new airplane with paying travelers before debugging the software or even putting a model in the wind tunnel, and doing so without FAA approval.

If anyone attempted that in aviation, no one and I mean NO ONE would board the plane including the crew and Captain, so why is it OK in healthcare?  Is it just because the avoidable disasters are one body at a time in Health vs. 200-400 at once in air travel?

The answer to the last question?

Yes.

-- SS

1 comment:

Steve Lucas said...

I could not help but think of my wife’s office. They went from a closed system, to an open PC based system, and back to a closed PC based system, The IT guys were not going to give up control of all those computers.

So there is a group planning lunch and one person hits the global reply all button. Instead of just going to the group this email goes out to every computer in the state system, then picks up all of those computers email list and then ends up in a loop after picking up all of the computers anyone had ever contacted vacation messages.

The system is down for hours and for the next two weeks people are coming back to work finding their computers full of bounce back vacation messages.

The IT people blame this one poor person for hitting the wrong button and then claim they need even more control of the computer system so this will not happen again. It seems that no matter what happens, it is the users fault and the solution is more power and more money for the IT department.

Steve Lucas