I was attending a meeting this week for those hospitals who use the same Patient Administration System.
The system suppliers were there, and at the start of the meeting were asking for suggestions to go into the next maintenance release. This in itself is nothing odd.
However, to put this into context, you need to know that the product we are using has been deemed 'end-of-life', and as we're are looking to take a brand new, entirely different system in the coming months (OK, years... OK decades...) we would only be getting minor, bug fix releases. So as a consequence we were quite pleased that they were considering updating the existing product, and were coming up with ideas thick and fast.
Anyway the meeting moved on, and some hours later a member of the group asked if it would be possible to have a minor enhancement. What followed was staggering. The supplier stated that they would have to cost this enhancement. You might think that this is not unusual. You might even have thought that this could be included in the maintenance release that was being discussed earlier.
No, what was staggering was that firstly one hospital already had the enhancement discussed so why would it have to be costed and paid for when the work had already been done, and secondly, the supplier chose this moment to tell the group that the previously discussed maintenance release may not happen!
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