21–30 of 43 posts
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Every single time I've heard about an org onboarding Cerner, it was a disaster. One wonders how they can possibly still be in business.
Oracle acquired them. So, now you have the full power of Oracle standing behind them to convince customers to adopt it, and the same power to keep customers from migrating.
I was aware of this VA project at the time, although I was no part of it. I knew it was going to take years and we basically had no competition. Shortly before I left the company we got a new CEO from Google (Health?). Now looking back this guy was probably brought specifically for preparing for the Oracle acquisition.
We were a team of 5. After the Oracle acquisition everyone left. That team basically disappeared. Three of my teammates left for another IT company in Kansas. Things must have gotten really tough after the acquisition.
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That's what they did. If you read the article, it discussed the whole program as being a change from an in house developed system, to an off the shelf system. > The program launched in 2018 to replace the aging computer system used across VA’s health care network, which serves more than 9 million veterans, with an off-the-shelf product that could handle many of the same tasks: organizing important information includi…
VistA is an old system, and it's definitely "aging." But the thing is that it actually works really, really well. For instance, it kills a remarkably low number of people, which is one of the benchmarks I personally value in an EHR. One of the interesting things about this is that, from my perspective, VistA's sort of a mesh of servers rather than the hierarchy we might expect from a federal system. Perhaps that's be…
Meanwhile in Sweden: > Scrapping the millennium: introduction of a health record in Sweden fails > The introduction of a new, heavily criticized electronic journal system from Oracle in two Swedish health districts has failed spectacularly. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Scrapping-the-millennium-introd...
I once flagged a bug in Epic, the big EHR system. The system had somehow mixed up kilograms and pounds. For example, a normal adult male weight of 150lbs would be ~68kg, But accidentally save it without converting and get 150kg. Convert back and it becomes 330lbs. Suddenly our reasonably slim man becomes grossly obese. It's not just wrong, it's extremely dangerous. In an emergency situations, where morphine is common…
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I wouldn't trust that a nurse or doctor that is bedside to flag that either, though. Hospitals are woefully understaffed, and while they will do there best, we are all just humans. My wife's grandmother was killed by a second dose of metformin (well kidney failure after a second dose) because the attending that administered the first dose left the room, planning on coming back a moment later, when the next round nurs…
I am very sad to hear that your grandmother died as a result of a medical error, but the details of the story as you remember them aren’t quite plausible. 1) Metformin is not available in an IV formulation 2) Metformin itself is not nephrotoxic It certainly is believable that a medical error caused kidney failure but it is very unlikely to have been caused by an incorrect second IV dose of Metformin.
What will it take to blacklist oracle from government contracts?
One need only google "Oracle failure" or visit theregister.com to see a list of atrocities committed yearly by Oracle for ERP and Financial system implementation fiascos, buying Cerner for their EMR that was already bad to use could only make it worse. It's like bad and worse got together to make a baby, but what are your alternatives in the space? I never met an ERP that wasn't a mess, or the staff that tend to manage them. Oracle just keeps expanding, because why be a lesser evil?
If you work in the medical IT field, you have my condolences, and my best advice is don't. The only ones that win are the executives above their meat shields and the investors. If you have to visit one in the US, you also have my condolences, as you'll see first hand the product above commentary.
After some 25 years of consulting/professional services in IT and working probably a dozen or more health care industry businesses or hospitals themselves, I can honestly say they are the worst clients and most I will simply refuse now as a rule. I've never met one that wasn't run poorly run, overly political, low paying, high spending, morale/morally deprived... I could go on, but mostly mismanaged applies, and more…