6 ms·

Something my doctor friends remind me of from time to time is how disconnected their actual workflows are from whatever system the money folks decided to buy.

• sfn42 1y ago
  I'd order birthday cakes daily just to prove a point
  • Y_Y 1y ago
    You may be pleased to know that you can do this via the GDS system for meal preference when booking flights by using the code CLML ("celebration cake meal") if your travel agent is cool.
    • somecontext 1y ago
      Here's a reference, as well as other options: https://worldgo.ca/understanding-your-airlines-meal-options/ https://worldgo.ca/understanding-your-airlines-meal-options/
  • dotancohen 1y ago
    1. He's paying for the cakes. 2. You're improving the metrics of the people who put it there. A better strategy would be to call the support desk stating that you can't find the order tests section. Then when they tell you where it is, state that you assumed you were in the wrong menu due to the presence of the obviously unrelated order cake button.
    • bboygravity 1y ago
      Does product support talk to the developpers department though? In most companies I worked at it was like they deliberately made it hard for those departments to communicate.
      • dotancohen 1y ago
        > Does product support talk to the developpers department though? Probably not. But most likely, metrics flow up to their common PM.
• samplatt 1y ago
  I read elsewhere on HN - "Well-meaning users will always quickly turn an unusable secure system into a usable insecure system."
  • short_sells_poo 1y ago
    The corollary is that a perfectly secure system is one which is completely and utterly inaccessible to anyone, including the users.
    • mr_toad 1y ago
      If the system is unusable some well-meaning user will set up their own system, which is unlikely to be secure.
    • FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
      Hey now, don't knock on batch processing systems.
    • freedomben 1y ago
      I always like this when explaining why the A in the CIA Triad matters: The most secure computer is one powered off, encased in cement, and dropped into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But it's not very useful
      • kstrauser 1y ago
        “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
• lazyasciiart 1y ago
  That’s how Jira works too.
• mexicocitinluez 1y ago
  It's called selling to the C-suite. But it's not just about money, its about compliance too. If you can tell a higher-up "Use my software and you'll never have to worry about another compliance issue" that's also pretty appealing regardless of how well it fits the current workflow.
  • coffeefirst 1y ago
    And the best part is you don’t even have to be right!
    • mexicocitinluez 1y ago
      that's for sure. It's not called "Selling to the people who use the system"
• Telemakhos 1y ago
  This is a symptom of a deeper problem in medicine, the subjugation of doctors. It used to be that doctors ran their own practices and were the Götter in Weiß, the gods in white lab-coats. What they said was what happened, and healing patients was their purpose. Now, however, doctors are cogs in a much larger healthcare system run by suits for purposes that one suspects have more to do with money than medicine. If computer workflows are optimized for the suits rather than the doctors, that’s a symptom of a problem whose other symptoms, like rampant price inflation, are yet worse.
  • zukzuk 1y ago
    My company builds software for medical office assistants, and our clients are typically doctor-owned clinics. We have literally the same problem, but one step down the ladder. The doctors are making the purchasing decision, but MOAs are the direct users. And ironically enough, we have often run into the same problem. Doctors often don’t see the value in software that solves their subordinates’ problems.
    • HaZeust 1y ago
      >"Doctors often don’t see the value in software that solves their subordinates’ problems." This was such a huge problem at my former company, Billit (getbillit.com), that our number 1 method on achieving clients was making such steep referral incentives for doctors, to their colleagues. We only needed one to make scale eventually happen, but the organic clients couldn't empathize with the workflows of their front desk - they didn't care.
  • resource_waste 1y ago
    >doctors are cogs in a much larger healthcare system run by suits for purposes that one suspects have more to do with money than medicine. Is that actually accurate? The American Medical Association (the Physician cartel/trade association) bribes/lobbies about equal as hospitals/owners. They also legally reduce supply using their private, unelected, ACGME. If we use lobbying numbers, they are just as obsessed with money as the owners.
• burnte 1y ago
  > Something my doctor friends remind me of from time to time is how disconnected their actual workflows are from whatever system the money folks decided to buy. There are two ways EMRs get made. They start from the money side and grow into clinical, or they start in clinical and grow into finance. This means however they started, that's what it'll be strong in. I would absolutely love to get to help design an EMR. A huge part of my job is finding ways to help our clinical staff spend less time in the EMR and more with patients. There's so much room for improvement, but it's a hard market to crack.
  • didgetmaster 1y ago
    You are absolutely correct about it being a hard market to crack. My wife, who is a doctor, often complains that the various systems she has to deal with are often unusable. When I was designing my new, general-purpose data management system that handles both structured and unstructured data well; she begged me to try to come up with a better system to manage medical data. While I think my system has the potential to make a much better EMR; the work and money needed to break into that market felt beyond my reach. A little startup with a superior architecture, but without all the political influence and domain knowledge to navigate the medical world; has little chance of gaining a foothold.
• andrepd 1y ago
  Also known as the Blackboard problem... It has to be the worst software I ever had the misfortune of using, because the people who choose it (admins) are not the ones who have to use it (profs and students.
  • Melonai 1y ago
    Also quite telling that when you go to Blackboard's (now called Anthology, apparently) site, 75% of it is dedicated solely to AI. You get a small blurb about "Experiencing the power of Together™", whatever that could mean, some small product description, of course all "AI-enhanced" and then lots of fluff about "industry-leading AI capabilities", "responsible/ethical edtech AI", "AI roadshows", etc. So much ado about what's definitely just an annoying ChatGPT wrapper button that most will definitely quietly learn to ignore... :)
    • andrepd 1y ago
      It's a multimillion dollar business entirely dedicated to the enterprise of selling Blackboard to schools. With the side-effect of producing a terrible piece of software.