Dr Adrian Midgley wrote:
>
>
> One other factor which affects the area under the curve, adding another dimension to
>the plot, is that permanet staff
> clinicians are in post for 30 years, whcih is rarely the case for IT staff at either
>the programming or administrating ends of the
> spectrum.
>
I think there is something to this observation. Which might
explain the longevity of the VA system in the US.
My experience with IT systems over the long haul, i.e. > 10
years, is that they last suprisingly long, given the current
conventional wisdom that anything over three years old is
obsolete.
Systems that are intended to be used continuously and that
have the programmers in house, tend to be continuously
changed. The task of a manager coming into a posisition and
needing to make an IT systems decision is that they either
have to 1) rely on a staff they neither know or have not yet
hired to build a system or 2) pick a vendor likely to
continue their software for the duration of that managers
posisition. Option 2 is a much bigger payoff.
So the challenge for Open Source Health Care software is
provide a comfort level, not with the effectiveness of the
software, but with the longevity and continuity of
development of that software.
