Remember the Therac!

Personal opinion warning!!!

Every time I read something like this, I immediately think of the famous Therac-25.

But let's start from the bottom...

"If you are deploying technology in your healthcare organization, ask yourself first if your people are ready. If they are not, you are setting the stage for failure."

This is so generic, Mr. Crounse should win a a prize. I'm sure, there is a prize somewhere for phrases like that.

How about:

"If you are deploying technology in your organization, ask yourself first if your people are ready. If they are not, you are setting the stage for failure."

Almost universally true but the gain of knowledge is essentially zilch.

But what really irks me is stuff like this (on the training of physicians):

"We spend our young adulthood immersed in the scholarly pursuit of a medical degree. We take four or more years in specialty training. [...] It’s all about following a certain process, a definitive kind of workflow"

Call me oldschool, but I expect a physician to be well trained and following certain, proven processes, when I lay my fate into her hands!

IT has already a major role in healthcare. Without advanced signal processing and medical imaging, MRI would be useless. Genome data simply cannot be analyzed without the help of computers. The human body can be simulated to some extent to reduce the need of testing new drugs on animals and human beings alike. Particle therapy needs absolute precision controls, provided by computers. And so on and on...

And what do I read?

"They are embracing cloud technologies to streamline IT resources and focus more of those limited resources on that which healthcare systems are all about—providing care to patients and increasingly, focusing on ways to improve population health and disease prevention."

OK, people are expensive, care is expensive so let's use IT to squeeze more out of the staff we have.

There is no single sentence about medical progress in this article. It's from top to bottom about cost-cutting.

I have to give credit to the overall assumption, that something good could be gained  from the integration of health-care data, though. A lot of knowledge about how diseases work and what weapon works best to fight them with could be gained from a holistic view on all the data available.

Yet, in many countries, there is a strict regulation on medical data. And here I have to give credit again - it's all about people. People building systems, people using systems and people having trust in systems.

In 2010 and 2011, physicians manipulated medical data of their patients waiting for a liver transplant in order to push them higher up the waiting list. This so called Organspendeskandal led to the lowest trust and henceforth lowest number of potential organ donors in Germany since 2002.

I am a registered bone marrow donor at DKMS. Yet, we are only a scant 25 million worldwide.  Already way to few. Guess what would happen, if there was a major security breach in this database? Or in any other large health data database?

"Information is no candy bar" they say in Bombardiers, (hilarious and highly recommended) If you eat it the candy bar its gone, but information can be stolen without notice.

Let's assume somebody would steal all the paper patient files from a hospital, or the insurance company. This could be noticed, because a) they are gone and b) somebody might ask what the four trucks full of paper are all about. Electronic files can be stolen without notice on an USB stick.

We, the people, still cannot build reliable and secure software systems at a large scale. SQL Injection is still #1 at OWASP. As it was 2010. 2007 it was on #2. Unbelievable.

Even in highly specialized and controlled areas, we fail, fail, fail.

So, where does this strict regulation on medical data come from again?

Whenever you work on hard or software for healthcare applications - please remember the Therac.

So much useful knowledge could be gained, but so much trust can be lost.

Personal opinion warning!!!