If only more information officers thought like John Halamka. He rails against complexity, and I completely agree:
In the world of IT, simplicity is often more reliable, more secure, and more usable. Whenever I’m tempted to add complexity to address the needs of a few customers, I remind myself that Less is More.
Many electronic record systems are needlessly bloated with rarely-used features. This steepens the learning curve, and makes finding and removing the problems more difficult.
Give me simplicity any day. Something that works as close to 100 percent of the time as possible, is intuitive, easy to learn, and makes the physician’s job easier.
If doing away with features is needed, so be it.
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- Coding complexity
- Coding complexity redux
- Profiting from the coding complexity
- Electronic records and economic sense
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Two quotes came to mind that are all too pertinent:
“Reliable and transparent programs are usually not in the interest of the designer.” — Niklaus Wirth, father of procedureal programming
“Where you give a software developer a choice of doing the simple thing or the more complicated thing, they go for the more complicated thing…”
Hasso Plattner, Chairman SAP, WSJ 15 May page B3
Chuck Brooks
FutureWare SCG
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