Continuing on the theme of finding key factors in the
success (or failure) of health care software, I would like
to add this:
Just because you can write a program to do X, does not
mean that the task involving X has been made better. Better
could be along many dimensions:
job satisfaction
patient outcome
organizational and societal expertise
efficiency of person performing X
efficiency of organization needing X performed.
In fact, I often find the latter two intertwined. I once
analysed a system where the overall efficiency of the
organization was going to be improved but at the expense of
each physician taking more time doing data entry per
patient. This was even with the great discrepency of labor
rates. You can guess how politically viable this was.
