@alda Many, many years ago, when I worked at a medical information system, I got to learn some Important Principles from my manager.
The first of them was, a computer must not get in the way of a doctor. The specific example, of which there were numerous examples (because of a recurring data quality issue) was, if a doctor makes a medical record of a man having become pregnant, or more urgently, having gotten his water broken and an emergency Caesarean being necessary, the computer must never try to override the doctor.
A data quality issue can be sorted out later. Somebody dying because a doctor was arguing with a computer instead of doing a life-saving surgery, can't.
And that's even before I learnt the Biological Period, that strange punctuation mark that appears in medical texts all the time. It looks just like a period, but it's pronounced But Biology Is Messy, And Sometimes There's Exceptions. Some people's hearts are on the right. Some people have six toes. Some people might well have two appendixes, so just because one was taken out three years ago is no good reason for a computer to argue a doctor wanting to schedule a new appendectomy. There will be time to count the appendixes later. Saving a life can't wait.
Back then, we often thought of medicine being a uniquely life-critical field of tech, but as decades pass, I keep running into good times to apply this principle increasingly often.
@bhawthorne @robryk @riley @alda for critical systems where seconds matter you don’t have a privilege to ask questions, you must accept whatever data is fed in your system. So if there is contradiction in data, you might add highlight that and add task to resolve this contradiction later. But you can’t stay in the way and force user to spend extra time. Even highlighting the problem can have huge negative impact on a mission, because it will add new info and might distract from task on hand
@robryk @riley @alda Checklists, physical markings, reidentificatiin, etc. are all tools to allow the healthcare providers themselves to reduce errors. Those are beneficial.
A computer system could, for example, ask for confirmation for entries that are outside the expected range (e.g., male pregnancy, pulse of 400) but the medical provider should have the final say.