gingernut,
I agree with you 100% -
Over the years, the "top down," approach to supplying systems which designers think we need, has not been of any benefit to improving patients health, or to help me improve the quality of care my patients deserve.
Designers seem to have the attitude of "this is what I can do," rather than "what do you need."
The fundamental raison d'etre of any computer system is to do what actually needs to be done, hopefully as accurately and efficiently as possible.
Unfortunately the IT landscape is littered with projects that were badly / wrongly specified (for whatever multitude of reasons). Not something that the IT industry or the business managers involved in the selection, procurement and specification should be proud of.
HOWEVER, I believe that the original point was "Oh my God, MS involved in healthcare software, shock horror", patients will die not because of what the system does, but simply because Windows will crash.
Not, perhaps the best-informed viewpoint as subsequent posts have indicated.
As an aside, which would be better - an application that does exactly what you want, but crashes occasionally, or is sometimes unavailable, (but human safety is not compromised) or an application that is 100% reliable but doesn't do what it needs to - or only 60-70% of what it needs to do?
I hasten to add that I'm not suggesting that MS software is more or less unreliable than any other (non safety critical) commercial platform.
SD