4 ms·

It would be nice to work oneself up into a great big RMS huff about windows vulnerabilities etc but this isn't the problem. Hospitals don't care about IT. Perio

It would be nice to work oneself up into a great big RMS huff about windows vulnerabilities etc but this isn't the problem. Hospitals don't care about IT. Period. I've worked IT in a lot of places including hospitals. The medical gigs stand out foremost in my mind as the most hostile and willfully ignorant places by far when it came to all things computerized.

jpxxx 14y ago
I utterly agree. I've found hospital IT staff to be negative, extremely unskilled, and openly hostile to even the most benign questions or requests. And I can't remember any other context where staff feel it's acceptable to hang up the phone on their contractors and consultants.
- vacri 14y ago
  Depends on the hospital, but when it's bad, it's bad. Where I worked, the typist's printer went down due to a network error. An urgent job ticket was raised (by phone, I believe) as this was a room of eight typists who typed up dictated reports - important function. I was fished out from between patients to try and fix the issue and was successful. Six months later, an IT tech fronts up to the desk to ask where the printer was that needed fixing. Same department had a tech that would only come down to look at the computers if our pretty staffer was there. When she left, he refused to come down.
w1ntermute 14y ago
That's not particularly surprising in a highly government-regulated industry. No one outside of IT is particularly interested in IT. The difference between the medical field and other non-IT fields that require IT is that those other fields are open to market pressures. Simply put, most people are lazy until they get smacked by the invisible hand. In the medical field, the invisible hand has been tied up by the government.
roc 14y ago
In my experience, medical technology solutions tend to be geared toward desk workers and bureaucrats because no-one else has the time to champion their needs and 'default' enterprise assumptions map so poorly to the needs of doctors and nurses. So you get doctors and nurses who hate computers and computer-based solutions reflexively because a few more clicks, or minor Windows-cruft-based annoyances are just irritants for an intake clerk, but often tip the scales of "what's faster and more effective" for nurses and doctors back toward pen-and-paper. Those workers tend to have UX needs that run more toward mobile users [1] and medical software is very rarely designed to meet those needs. And the general aversion to computers -- again, in my experience -- is an act. Honestly saying they hate a given system has political costs and asking for changes again takes time (they rarely have to spare) to define and follow-through. But saying they simply aren't proficient with computers often has no such costs and can be very effective in getting overhead tasks pushed off to other workers. This is also why you see those same types of users take so quickly and eagerly to the new wave of stripped-down mobile companion apps. They don't necessarily want to carry a tablet instead of a clip-board. They just really want to use a focused-task, minimal, responsive interface instead of another windows enterprise UI. All of that is to say: Hospitals do care about IT. They just have a not-altogether-unique situation where the people who would most benefit from computerization rarely make time to see the projects done to their specifications and the overhead in 'typical' enterprise solutions can make-or-break feasibility. [2] [1] half-seconds count. size of click targets counts. data unrelated to the current task is wasteful noise. etc. [2] law and cpa firms can be similar, due the inaccessibility of the partners, the political situations and the resistance to anything that introduces overhead they can't bill for. These places, not unlike hospitals, often only see successful technology projects when they're limited to improving the speed/accuracy of administrative groups.

jpxxx 14y ago

I utterly agree. I've found hospital IT staff to be negative, extremely unskilled, and openly hostile to even the most benign questions or requests. And I can't remember any other context where staff feel it's acceptable to hang up the phone on their contractors and consultants.

vacri 14y ago
Depends on the hospital, but when it's bad, it's bad. Where I worked, the typist's printer went down due to a network error. An urgent job ticket was raised (by phone, I believe) as this was a room of eight typists who typed up dictated reports - important function. I was fished out from between patients to try and fix the issue and was successful. Six months later, an IT tech fronts up to the desk to ask where the printer was that needed fixing. Same department had a tech that would only come down to look at the computers if our pretty staffer was there. When she left, he refused to come down.

w1ntermute 14y ago

That's not particularly surprising in a highly government-regulated industry. No one outside of IT is particularly interested in IT. The difference between the medical field and other non-IT fields that require IT is that those other fields are open to market pressures. Simply put, most people are lazy until they get smacked by the invisible hand. In the medical field, the invisible hand has been tied up by the government.

roc 14y ago

In my experience, medical technology solutions tend to be geared toward desk workers and bureaucrats because no-one else has the time to champion their needs and 'default' enterprise assumptions map so poorly to the needs of doctors and nurses. So you get doctors and nurses who hate computers and computer-based solutions reflexively because a few more clicks, or minor Windows-cruft-based annoyances are just irritants for an intake clerk, but often tip the scales of "what's faster and more effective" for nurses and doctors back toward pen-and-paper. Those workers tend to have UX needs that run more toward mobile users [1] and medical software is very rarely designed to meet those needs. And the general aversion to computers -- again, in my experience -- is an act. Honestly saying they hate a given system has political costs and asking for changes again takes time (they rarely have to spare) to define and follow-through. But saying they simply aren't proficient with computers often has no such costs and can be very effective in getting overhead tasks pushed off to other workers. This is also why you see those same types of users take so quickly and eagerly to the new wave of stripped-down mobile companion apps. They don't necessarily want to carry a tablet instead of a clip-board. They just really want to use a focused-task, minimal, responsive interface instead of another windows enterprise UI. All of that is to say: Hospitals do care about IT. They just have a not-altogether-unique situation where the people who would most benefit from computerization rarely make time to see the projects done to their specifications and the overhead in 'typical' enterprise solutions can make-or-break feasibility. [2] [1] half-seconds count. size of click targets counts. data unrelated to the current task is wasteful noise. etc. [2] law and cpa firms can be similar, due the inaccessibility of the partners, the political situations and the resistance to anything that introduces overhead they can't bill for. These places, not unlike hospitals, often only see successful technology projects when they're limited to improving the speed/accuracy of administrative groups.