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Most hospitals are running on woefully outdated and/or inadequate technology. I've had a few different friends in healthcare IT and every story has been a night

• nradov 8y ago
  In hospitals, most back end IT improvements don't directly drive revenue or care quality. So funding tends to be diverted to other things like new surgery centers, higher resolution MRI machines, nicer patient rooms, free care for the indigent, etc.
  • elpakal 8y ago
    This. Backend IT was most definitely a cost center and even more so one that was very poorly run and incentivized to not change. They have a pension program there and there are soo many people who made it and are pensioned that the only incentive they have is to ensure things do not change.
• Balgair 8y ago
  Certification. You CANNOT have bugs in your ventilators, pill dispensers, heart-rate monitors, etc. As such, they are typically only certified on some old version of Windows. As such, they can't be updated, or they have to re-cert that new version of windows. By certification, it goes anywhere from the bugs in the compiler all the way to the EMI interference from a cell-phone that may interact and cause a fault. It can be very intense. Re-doing a cert is an incredible mess. So, they stay on the old version and that makes integrating with all the various versions of mainframes, windows, DOS, UNIX, etc. a total disaster of a task.