[Ithildin]

"The software industry makes amazing tools for itself, while doctors and scientists are stuck with old code. Tech needs to quit hacking and start listening."

Then pay for better software? Take your money elsewhere? I don't understand what we're supposed to do here. I get it, your industry has old software. Maybe hire us to make it better? Not my problem you're still using Windows XP and Fortran though. Sounds to me like corners were cut and budgets were not set appropriately.

[908B64B197]

There's a lot of money in the medical industry (private or public) but it seems that everywhere and everyone is constantly getting their budget slashed. Yet the amount of money that's poured into this industry keeps balooning!

I have this rule that any organization that treats software as a cost center will systematically get bad software AND overpay for it. Because by under-funding (with compensation, tittle and power in the organization) engineering they end-up pushing talent elsewhere, mostly to organizations where tech is considered a profit center.

Software, it seems, is treated as a cost center by the medical industry and by a lot of research labs (things like not granting authorship to software contributors).

The tone of the article is rather typical of the medical industry. Very condescending to say the least.

[vsareto]

Pay isn't the issue for hospitals buying software, they are already paying big money to vendors. And they often can't take their money elsewhere because of contracts. I heard 10 years lock-in for an EHR solution.

Lots of software churn is probably bad for medical workers too if they are constantly retraining in high stress environments - they might be technical but may not be comfortable with computers.

Building your own software is do-able for some aspects (to avoid paying millions for a simple web app), but most hospitals are not going to want to build their own EHR software or other large pieces.

[Tsarbomb]

While not EHRs, I have experience working in the EMR field, and it absolutely was a race to the bottom, vendors undercutting each other, and physicians being surprised that the cheapest vendor or product they went with turned out to be total trash.