Another Major HIT Project Setback at UCSF: Vendor, Client or Both at Fault?

Scott Silverstein | Health Care Renewal | October 13, 2009

In yet another example of a major health IT project setback, in August I wrote about UCSF's apparent problems with health IT implementation that I learned about through anonymous comments at the HisTALK blog. At "Lessons Unlearned: Health IT Failure, Act 2" I wrote:

I find it remarkable that this resource-wasting scenario (with possible adverse patient care repercussions) can occur:

  • In a state that's in a severe economic crisis,
  • At an organization that failed severely in a HIT and administrative IT merger ten years ago (in the failed, late 1990's attempted merger between UCSF and Stanford's medical centers, see the 2000 stories "UCSF/Stanford: Marriage was rough; divorce is expensive" here and "A thousand MIS personnel cannot merge two healthcare systems" here),
  • With an EHR product, Centricity, that is the descendant of Logician that others have implemented successfully (including myself, speaking from experience),
  • With GE, a major global high technology vendor, presiding over this new failure at a major academic medical center,
  • With ample preventive material available in books, journals on the web about such failures (e.g., at the many pages and links here and here, as just a few examples).

I asked if vendor and hospital executives bother to read such materials...