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We need to reboot your doctor, please press “CTRL-ALT-DELETE”

. Posted in Users_external

Just imagine that you are men in his thirty and feeling not well, fatigue, nauseas, vomiting and a high body temperature. Your doctor has diagnosed as being pregnant and not with a flue.  Most likely the doctor is going to ask you if you've missed a period for a week or two…. In this cases you didn’t have the worst doctor in the world, you’ve actually encountered a bug in your medical software at home.

This is a non-existing bug in a software system that’s doesn’t exist however these day’s such application’s are coming fast. Last year at the Eurostar convention we already looked forward with James Whittaker at Microsoft Healthcare Vision

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In an article about the “Electronic monitors provide care without doctor” we see already that a number of tasks are taking over from the doctor by a software program. Currently this program is under a test by Kaiser Permanente's Sidney R. Garfield Health Care Innovation Centerwhere they test new medical technology, such as the home monitor to see if they are practical.   

“Sherry Fry, the center's operations specialist, said the complex intends to work out the bugs of a new system or concept before they are deployed to hospitals and patients. It had what she called "successful failures," weeding out ideas that proved unusable in real-life settings. The center shares its findings and has drawn 17,000 visitors from 29 countries, including health care workers, university researchers and tech innovators”.   

The phrase ‘pratical’ and ‘successful failures” , if I look what is depending on the right conclusion, I hope they will test a little more than this. Again this example shows that testing is looking at the bigger picture and not only at one test level. In the article they also described that the employees can use the center to test everything from new types of hospital floor materials to workflow adjustments to robotic nursing assistants and high-definition operating room video screens.   

My feeling is that these employees are not the “standard” people who are going to work with these machines. Every time you are working with a new, cool gadget your acceptance level will slightly adjust till the moment you will except bigger changes (divagations).   

Why don’t setup a good set of quality requirements that can be used for a broad variety of medical products, specified for each medical business area - group?  

The research center has created a “simulating world” where men still can be pregnant and the medical company (customer) needs to consider if their applications is going to work in real live.   

I will wait with using this medical application till it’s really proven in production, with real people and real diseases.