:Code Red: How software companies could screw up Obama’s health care reform.
Code Red: How software companies could screw up Obama’s health care reform. Dec 15, 2009, 17 :32 UTC (8 Talkback[s]) (3819 reads) (Other stories by Phillip Longman)
"Things did not go so smoothly at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, which installed a computerized health system in 2002. Rather than a godsend, the new system turned out to be a disaster, largely because it made it harder for the doctors and nurses to do their jobs in emergency situations. The computer interface, for example, forced doctors to click a mouse ten times to make a simple order...
"Why did similar attempts to bring health care into the twenty-first century lead to triumph at Midland but tragedy at Children’s? While many factors were no doubt at work, among the most crucial was a difference in the software installed by the two institutions. The system that Midland adopted is based on software originally written by doctors for doctors at the Veterans Health Administration, and it is what’s called "open source," meaning the code can be read and modified by anyone and is freely available in the public domain rather than copyrighted by a corporation."
