I would rant about the state of IT in the health care industry, but Sean McCown does it so much better.
In rant #1 (not directly health care related), McCown asks why it’s so hard to adopt Powershell and notes that part of the problem is that proponents aren’t selling its biggest advantage. At my present job, we aren’t allowed to use Powershell; my manager and I have made the case, but the higher-ups (who are more comfortable with circa 2000 technology than today’s) just aren’t interested. They’d rather have people waste time doing point-and-click activities, perform unnecessary and mistake-prone manual operations, and use the wrong tool for the job than adapt to what’s already here. This makes absolutely no business sense—they’re definitely wasting time and money on things that should be automated, such as database and report deployments, server log reading (collecting the logs on a central syslog server and e-mailing out whenever certain threshholds get met), and regular maintenance.
Rant #2, however, ties directly to health care IT. I’ve worked in health care IT for most of my career (including time at a couple of hospitals, a health-related state agency, and a health insurance provider). Every word of this rant rings true to me. Between subject-matter expert bleedover into everything expert, HIPAA (and a slew of other federal and state regulations), and extreme risk aversion, it’s amazing that things actually ever happen.
