The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

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.

Now we have Chipsoft, arguably one of the worst players in the entire IT space that has a near monopoly (around me, anyway) on IT for hospitals. They charge a fortune, produce crap software and the larger they get the less choice there is for the remainder. It is baffling to me that we should be enabling such hostile players.

Around here we have Epic. If you want a good scare, look up their corporate Willy Wonka-esq jail/campus and their policy of zero remote work.