I am very happy that I do not work in healthcare... It is a tough job, and definitively not made easier by less than functional systems. It was decided in the region I live in that all hospitals and healtcare facilites had to adopt and use the same journalling system, so that patient data could be accessable at any hospital they visited. Good idea. There are even plans on making sure it is availible nationally. Now, I am the first to admit that doing such projects at that kind of scale is bound to be filled with problems.
Last week was appearently total chaos in the region as they launched this new system (Millenium by Cerner), a system that so far has cost 5.5 billion SEK (US style of billion, not Europe style of billion)... For those with any knowledge of large IT-systems I think you can start drawing some conclusions.
They say only 25% of all IT-project are succesful (as in "On Time, On budget, and According to specs". This was not a success according to those criteria, and the people at the that came up with hat must have been optimists)
My hometown and the area closest to it was supposed to be the first to get the new system. They had planned so emergency patients would be rerouted to different hospitals, and they had deliberatley made sure not too many other stuff were scheduled. Well let's just say it failed spectacularily, and the news has been all over it.
They launched it last Tuesday. On Friday, just 4 days later they decided to pause the launch to fix all the problems. Problems so bad that at least one healthcare facility went into using "manual routines" in order to maintain patient safety... "Manual Routines" as in using Pen and Paper, as the journalling system could not be trusted. Such things like the reporting of admistrating medications to patients did not show up properly, prescriptions for medications to be purchased at the pharmacies did not make it, or when using the voice-to-text part of the system it left out some rather important data, like "No abnormalities" became "abnormalities"... It was also according to info very very rigid, and very slow. So they are restarting the old systems now, just to get functionality back. Voices have been heard by doctors and healthcare personal that all implementations of this new system should be scrapped, and that it was money down the drain. But I guess there is too much prestige at stake by the politicians and other people inviled in the decisions.
This was supposed to have been a fully functional system. It was made 25 years ago for the US market, and is now being tailored to fit the Swedish market (there is another region in southern Sweden that also are going to implement it). And it appears that the system is not complete. They had some really crappy acceptance-tests and not even under the most ideal tests controlled by the supplier could it live up to what was needed.. And in case you hade any wonders about why this was such a mess, the company that makes it is owned by Oracle...
