Why is Larry Ellison Rich?

I know no one who likes Oracle, either the product, which really is not any better than its competitors, nor the company whose policies towards its customers can only described as abusive.

Still, I do get the idea that if your IT department selects Oracle, they can be sure that they will never be fired for that decision.

At least until now, as Oracle engineers screwed the pooch yet again, leading dozens of hospitals having to return to paper records for almost a week.

This is what happens without aggressive antitrust enforcement.

Monopolists lapse into incompetence:

Oracle engineers mistakenly triggered a five-day software outage at a number of Community Health Systems hospitals, causing the facilities to temporarily return to paper-based patient records.

CHS told CNBC that the outage involving Oracle Health, the company's electronic health record (EHR) system, affected "several" hospitals, leading them to activate "downtime procedures." Trade publication Becker's Hospital Review reported that 45 hospitals were hit.

The outage began on April 23, after engineers conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database, a CHS spokesperson said in a statement. The outage was resolved on Monday, and was not related to a cyberattack or other security incident.

………

An EHR is a digital version of a patient's medical history that's updated by doctors and nurses. It's crucial software within the U.S. health-care system, and outages can cause serious disruptions to patient care. Oracle acquired EHR vendor Cerner in 2022 for $28.3 billion, becoming the second-biggest player in the market, behind Epic Systems.

………

Oracle's CHS error comes weeks after the company's federal electronic health record experienced a nationwide outage. Oracle has struggled with a thorny, years-long EHR rollout with the Department of Veterans Affairs, marred by patient safety concerns. The agency launched a strategic review of Cerner in 2021, before Oracle's acquisition, and it temporarily paused deployment of the software in 2023.

I would note that every medical professional that I have discussed this with hates EHRs.

It's all been downhill since the initial release of MUMPS, because the people in charge of development are now programmers, and not medical professionals, and the customers are now IT departments and bean counters whose goal for the software is to maximize profits, largely through upcharging.

This is what happens when you allow the inmates run the asylum.