Hospital Computer Systems—for Medicine or for Money?

Conventional automated hospital information systems (AHIS) are still excessively expensive and of very doubtful cost-effectiveness. They may be regarded as belonging to a distinct class of computer applications— Operations Management Systems— and suffering from a stage of conceptual confusion found with most of this class in industry ten years ago. This stage seems in serious danger of protraction with AHIS— worsened by a new deflection of AHIS from their original medical goals; and of a continued, perhaps long-lasting, neglect of the opportunities presented by research on smaller and more effective systems.