2 ms·

That "irrationality" is fundamental to many types of enterprise software, which is a big reason why most of it sucks. You're codifying hundreds of years of est

by akeefer 17y ago

That "irrationality" is fundamental to many types of enterprise software, which is a big reason why most of it sucks. You're codifying hundreds of years of established precedent, often heavily legally regulated in slightly different ways by all 50 states (not to mention foreign countries). The more established precedent there is, the more history in the industry, and the more regulation, the harder it is to write decent software.

rdl 17y ago
That is more true for EHR than for a lot of the more specialized systems in radiology, pharmacy, lab, etc. For those, it's much more clearly a CS problem, with a UI component, and then some interaction with existing crappy systems (mainly the EHR). The EHR itself is the black hole of suck. It almost always ends up being like an ERP package, with either an off the shelf package (e.g. SAP) where the workflow is changed to accomodate the package, or a semi-custom consulting product built around specific workflow. Luckily, the more specialized stuff is actually vastly simpler.
- akeefer 17y ago
  Sounds about right . . . any time you're solving a particular problem, things get a lot simpler. You need something to do x and y, so you make something do x and y, and it's pretty easy to tell whether what you've made sucks and x and y or not. Once you have to handle anything workflow-ish or manage any sort of business process, or any time you have to handle integration to arbitrary external systems, it's very difficult to make anything that doesn't suck. The "right" thing becomes very fuzzy, and there's no one purpose or problem you can use as your rightness criterion, so it all becomes very fuzzy. Things then get worse when some standards committee tries to please everyone, or when business users insist that they want everything to work exactly the way it used to just, you know, with a computer know. And since there's no easy criterion against which to judge the solution, it's an easy slope down towards even more suck.

by akeefer 17y ago

rdl 17y ago

That is more true for EHR than for a lot of the more specialized systems in radiology, pharmacy, lab, etc. For those, it's much more clearly a CS problem, with a UI component, and then some interaction with existing crappy systems (mainly the EHR). The EHR itself is the black hole of suck. It almost always ends up being like an ERP package, with either an off the shelf package (e.g. SAP) where the workflow is changed to accomodate the package, or a semi-custom consulting product built around specific workflow. Luckily, the more specialized stuff is actually vastly simpler.

akeefer 17y ago
Sounds about right . . . any time you're solving a particular problem, things get a lot simpler. You need something to do x and y, so you make something do x and y, and it's pretty easy to tell whether what you've made sucks and x and y or not. Once you have to handle anything workflow-ish or manage any sort of business process, or any time you have to handle integration to arbitrary external systems, it's very difficult to make anything that doesn't suck. The "right" thing becomes very fuzzy, and there's no one purpose or problem you can use as your rightness criterion, so it all becomes very fuzzy. Things then get worse when some standards committee tries to please everyone, or when business users insist that they want everything to work exactly the way it used to just, you know, with a computer know. And since there's no easy criterion against which to judge the solution, it's an easy slope down towards even more suck.