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by frereubu 2356 days ago
This is a pretty simplistic comment that seriously underestimates how complex this stuff is. (Are you Dominic Cummings by any chance?) IT systems like the one in the NHS are huge, have grown organically over time and are mission-critical. You can't just trash one system and start from scratch (witness the Universal Credit debacle in the UK). It's like repairing a ship while it's sailing. Yes, there's quite a bit of money involved, but I can only imagine someone who writes a comment along the lines of "it's easy, just do X" has never touched a system like this, or had to write budgets for it.

I'd also like to see you walk into a situation like this, no matter how much power you had, and see how far 'Arguments about "but corporate / compliance / vendor contracts / red tape" be damned.' gets you.

2 comments

I was like "40 million won't be enough to make a dent" :D
Ah no, you clearly misunderstand that NHS doesn’t actually use a single system f or everything. What IT systems are used depends on the hospital discussed, and thus 40M isn’t really about the complexity of a single system - it’s simply a paycheck to pay for upgrades of many systems running in parallel and barely having any interop whatsoever.