On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 08:35, David Forslund wrote: > division of labor and efficiency in people knowing their field. You see > books on how to be a C++ expert in 21 days, but > not how to be a brain surgeon in 21 days. I think it is laughable for > anyone to think they could be a C++ expert > in 21 days. I think it is a waste of time for a physician to create > healthcare-oriented web pages other than providing
I would strongly disagree. I would go that far as proclaiming that the current misery in health IT is due to the lack of medical domain knowledge in too many of those dabbling in health IT. The reason why you can learn to be productive with simple scripting languages in very short time is - that they are simple. A tool. Like a spread sheet. Would you say that doctors should not do their calculations in spread sheets either? Your example with C++ is not valid - different league. The reason why I went through informatics was for the same reason: as a student in human genetics at that time I was frustrated (same as everybody else in the department) that the IT guys always blew our budget without ever delivering what we needed. They blamed us for not delivering the right specs. We claimed that by the time we go that deep into the nitty gritty with the specs it will be trivial to implement it ourselves w/o need for the IT guys. Time proved that our assumption was correct: in less than two years a handful of geneticists (me among them) learned enough IT to solve all our problems to our complete satisfaction. I was the only one to continue with IT from that bunch (and later changed again into medicine), but the others are still proficient enough to *solve* their day-to-day computing needs with minimal extra effort. Lesson learned was that it takes a lot longer to introduce a domainless software engineer into highly specific domains (such as medicine or genetics) than to teach the respective domain specialists enough software engineering to solve their problems themselves. Mind you - that was at a time where we had to write hundreds of thousands of lines in Fortran (!) without access to any reasonable software libraries at all - guess what the evolution of programming tools means for that lesson. Horst
