...keyboards and mice were unprotected from bacterial contamination. My advice on changes to more appropriate hardware and other measures to ensure patient safety were simply overruled by IT personnel.
My counsel as postdoctoral-trained Medical Informaticist and ICU-trained clinician was simply dismissed and overruled by the IT staff and CIO on grounds that the IT staff were unfamiliar with existing, ICU-appropriate computer hardware and wouldn't support or even evaluate "nonstandard" (to them) computers in any case. Further, hospital administration sided with the IT department, a department led and staffed by business computing personnel (of “management information systems” or MIS background) totally lacking in clinical knowledge and experience. Patients remained at risk...
While clinical IT is now potentially capable of achieving many of the benefits long claimed for it such as improved medical quality and efficiency, reduced costs, better medical research and drugs, earlier disease detection, and so forth, there is a major caveat and essential precondition: the benefits will be realized only if clinical IT is done well. For if clinical IT is not done well, as often occurs in today’s environment of medical quick fixes and seemingly unquestioning exuberance about IT, the technology can be injurious to medical practice and biomedical R&D, and highly wasteful of scarce healthcare capital and resources.
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