Apophthegmata

From Granizada

First Law of Medical and Legal Informatics

Medical and Legal sectors do not differ from any other service-oriented knowledge business except they:

• have requirements for archiving, integrity, auditing and transparency that are explicit rather than just best practice
• have traditional power structures that are fundamentally affected by IT systems, and which resist the tendancy of IT systems to modify these power structures
• tend to buy more expensive systems with less regard to price or quality

First Presumption of Medical and Legal Informatics

Hoping every time for a nice surprise, I now start by assuming IT deployments in the Medical and Legal sectors:

1. are less effective at meeting archiving, integrity, auditing and transparency requirements than sectors with lower requirements.
2. never apply the standards required in professional practice to internal IT: "near enough is good enough, and never mind how I know what I know."
3. are so invisible to the partners that there is no acknowledgement of (1) and (2) as a business risk, or at least no quantifying of that risk.