> the design choices were more political than technical: administrative staff and doctors had different views about what should be included. I worked at a comp

> the design choices were more political than technical: administrative staff and doctors had different views about what should be included. I worked at a company that designed such a system. I was not involved with the project but when the system came out there was a lot of heat in the press quoting medical professionals about how bad the system was. Suddenly, with the new system, the workarounds used in the previous one stopped working. The problem, of course, was not in the "programming" part, even if the press portrayed it so. The problem was the requirements and the insanity of the medical management to force the users to stick to the exact documented work process. The article addresses this as well later on and describes how solutions are then added by workgroups for specific fields. Just another example how you should design such a system along with the users and not by encoding work process some administrative entity proscribed.