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449 points lemper | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.409s | source
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elric ◴[] No.45037119[source]
One of the commenters on the article wrote this:

> Throughout the 80s and 90s there was just a feeling in medicine that computers were dangerous <snip> This is why, when I was a resident in 2002-2006 we still were writing all of our orders and notes on paper.

I was briefly part of an experiment with electronic patient records in an ICU in the early 2000s. My job was to basically babysit the server processing the records in the ICU.

The entire staff hated the system. They hated having to switch to computers (this was many years pre-ipad and similarly sleek tablets) to check and update records. They were very much used to writing medications (what, when, which dose, etc) onto bedside charts, which were very easy to consult and very easy to update. Any kind of dataloss in those records could have fatal consequences. Any delay in getting to the information could be bad.

This was *not* just a case of doctors having unfounded "feelings" that computers were dangerous. Computers were very much more dangerous than pen and paper.

I haven't been involved in that industry since then, and I imagine things have gotten better since, but still worth keeping in mind.

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greazy ◴[] No.45037439[source]
It's still an issue. I've heard stories of EMR system going down forcing staff to use pen and paper. It boggles my mind that such systems don't have redundancy.

These are commercial products being deployed.

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1. elric ◴[] No.45038797[source]
I have a few pet theories of why software in the medical space is so often shitty and insanely expensive. One of them is that working with doctors is often very unpleasant, which makes building software them unpleasant, which drives up the price. I mean some of the ones I worked with were terribly nice, especially the ICU docs and neurologists, but a large majority of them were major aholes.

The other theory is there are soo many bureaucratic hoops to jump through in order to make anything in the medical space, that no one does it willingly.

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2. ◴[] No.45039255[source]
3. siva7 ◴[] No.45039264[source]
It's not only the doctors, i have the gut feeling from my previous stint that people who like to work in the medical space are more often than not "difficult".