Health IT As An Ultra Large-Scale System

Doug Fridsma | Health IT Buzz | February 21, 2013

This week I want to discuss a technical report that was issued in 2003, but that (I think) can help us understand why getting to an interoperable health IT system is so hard, and why we are not advocating for a single health care IT system.

We often see health care systems (and the IT in health care) as different and not comparable to work that has been done in other areas. However, I think there is a lot that we can learn from other industries.

Coordinating a billion lines of code

The Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI) report, “Ultra-Large-Scale Systems: The Software Challenge of the Future” sought to answer the question...