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I am too busy to be helped!
This world has changed, and we are all running but cannot catch up! I got my start in testing hospital systems in the mid 1990’s when one of our sales guys had the idea of wanting to help more than one hospital at once — a single testing product to help all hospitals regardless of how they were configured. Yup, this looked like an impossible task. We had tested banks, insurance companies, airlines and space based systems to that point, but hospitals were a challenge due to their very nature of change. Well, six months later we did it, and healthcare facilities embraced this new product, TestStream.
For the next 15 years we saw people take the time, and have the time, to execute TestStream in their environment and worldwide we saw better and smoother go-lives. Today, in general, I see go-lives being more stressful with less and less testing, with virtually no regression testing throughout the year.
People in this industry care — far more than any other — yet are not able to complete that vital task to ensure patient safety. So, what happened? Well, life got in the way. Today’s healthcare environments have caring people who are swamped with an overload of projects, and do not have the time to click a “Start Test” button, or even time to ask for help. The picture below has been floating around the ether and it accurately represents the healthcare world as I see it today:
The projects are not going to stop coming, and the resources are not going to increase. So, we need to find ways to help each other. Just take a breath, sit back, and ask for help.