Slashdot Mirror
How Much Is Oracle To Blame For Healthcare IT Woes?
Nerval's Lobster writes "The state of Oregon blames Oracle for the failures of its online health exchange. The health-insurance site still doesn't fully work as intended, with many customers forced to download and fill out paper applications rather than sign up online; Oracle has reportedly informed the state that it will sort out the bulk of technical issues by December 16, a day after those paper applications are due. 'It is the most maddening and frustrating position to be in, absolutely,' Liz Baxter, chairwoman of the board for the online exchange, told NPR. 'We have spent a lot of money to get something done—to get it done well—to serve the people in our state, and it is maddening that we can't seem to get over this last hump.' Oregon state officials insist that, despite payments of $43 million, Oracle missed multiple deadlines in the months leading up to the health exchange's bungled launch." (Read more, below.)
"This isn't the first time Oracle's name has circulated in conjunction with the Affordable Care Act's digital drama. In November, USA Today published a piece suggesting that 'communication breakdowns' with Oracle Identity Manager had led to 'bottlenecks' in the registration process for Healthcare.gov, the federal online health exchange, which in turn prevented some users from signing up for healthcare. But a single contractor doesn't lie at the root of the federal Healthcare.gov's spectacular debacle: despite months of preparations, large sections of the site remained unfinished on launch day, and the completed parts crashed as soon as users began entering the site. According to multiple sources, the Medicare agency tasked with overseeing the project failed to adequately test, much less integrate, the site's complex elements ahead of launch day. Even if it didn't hold that much responsibility for the federal Website's issues, though, Oracle could find itself the target of much more blame in the Oregon case, where it was reportedly the sole contractor and overseer."
This after Oracle came out explaining how Open Source is not only dangerous but a cancer to development. I'm so glad Oracle has shown with out a shadow of a doubt that Open Source software leads to broken systems, I would hate to not know this, good work Oracle, from now on I'll always pick the closed source guys ...
Oracle services may at times make a hash of things.
But we are too quick to blame Oracle and the developer of healthcare.gov for problems that come down to what is simply, a bad and incomplete spec that is impossible to build a good system against.
Indeed the "re-launch" of Healthcare.gov recently only works so much better because they scrapped the requirement that an application had to be completed in order for you to see prices (so you would not see the real price). The application process still is deeply flawed; but you can at least see raw static data now...
So don't place too much blame on Oracle for not succeeding at a Herculean task.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Plenty of the latter will help you sign the cheques for endless customization work orders until the money is gone. They have no actual interest in getting your product to market.
Of course, bad project/program management is the actual fault here but at some point an ethical consultant will say 'Look, this will kick the can down the road to infinity+10 minutes.'
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
In any other context "can't deliver on time" means "you're fired and we're suing for breach of contract." In the software solutions market it means "we're going to ride your sunk cost fallacy into the ground, please send us more money."
Having only recently started to use Oracle, and based on those experiences, I'm pretty sure that 90% of all cancer cases in the U.S. can be blamed on Oracle.
When the bus is barreling towards you, throw them under it first!
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I am talking about both because both face the same issues. They are trying to build a website against a spec that was never complete until very late, and even now had fundamental problems in implementation because of what they are trying to do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My team has been talking about healthcare.gov and all the related woes for a while. Pretty much we're all in agreement that we should thank the baby jeebus every day it's not our project haha. Seriously though, for something this complex, if the team grows to over about 15 people it's doomed. And that's just YOUR side, I have a lot of experience interfacing to insurance providers' systems. Half the time the provider you're trying to connect to is broken and doesn't work per their API docs at a basic level let alone have proper capacity let alone have any sense of normal connectivity. I can't even imagine trying to talk to something as huge as the IRS. I bet it's 6 months before you can get a simple spelling fix on an API method pushed out to production.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Years ago, Oracle sub-contracted my former company to implement a minor portion of a very large ERP rollout. During the rollout there were huge technical glitches, and the client wasn't happy. It didn't help that my company's small team was telling the much larger Oracle team how to solve their technical problems. In the end, the client put our company in charge of the rollout, and it got done. What we found in other projects with Oracle (we were a Oracle partner) was that our personnel had much deeper expertise with Oracle than members of their own company.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Central Planning at its best. What we would consider worse, they consider better.
Everything seems to swing. But one thing is certain, always follow the money.
This whole 'contracting' affair on both the public and private sector does not produce the highest quality products. Why should it? None of the incentives are there.
The contracting company doesn't want to build something that works without flaws for a minimal profit. They want to have continuing profits. This is not unique to big corporations. Just try dealing with any contractor or mechanic. Sure if you *know* them, you can deal with them honestly somewhat. Or if you pay them enough... and they can cost a lot, you can get an honest deal.
At best, you hope they do a good job and that means you build a good relationship, and that means more business in the future. But of course, when this comes to government contracts, what that natural process means is that it gets called corruption.
On the other hand, you can have the builder operate it. There's some incentive there for them to do a good job as they get a cut of continuing operations. I think there is some hope that the 'cloud' will actually provide for better overall software. Although of course this results in vendor lockin and could potentially cause all kinds of other business problems.
Or you could build it in house. Then of course you run the risk of an overstaffed bureaucracy and unionized government workers.
There's no real easy solution. But I do think the dominant view has swayed too far towards contracting.
They're unbreakable, after all.
#DeleteChrome
No matter what you do, you will find yourself in this same position with Oracle.
I've had the misfortune of using their collaboration platform, which despite their claims to the contrary, was essentially a beta product that even they didn't know how to set up and configure.
My experience with Oracle is they consistently over-promise, under-deliver, and over-charge.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Blame should be placed where it belongs; on the government hacks that put this tragic waste of tax-dollar money into service.
It Takes Two to Tango. Blame government for having no idea how to procure software, and blame the mega-contractors for doing everything they can to take advantage of this. The right thing to do is to sack some bureaucrats (possibly also politicians, though I'm more inclined to blame others as no politician actively wants a failure on their watch; it makes them look bad) and throw a bunch of corporate scumbags in jail.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
And you can bet that Oracle has lawyers ensuring they never actually meet the legal definition of fraud, and that the contracts have enough wiggle room to cover their asses.
But, I can also tell you that it's entirely common for companies contracting for this kind of thing to start off with the full knowledge that they've not asked for enough money to cover everything and get you a working system -- instead they rely on having to do changes and enhancements on a time and materials basis. And then they make a small fortune in quibbling over every little change.
I've seen several of these kinds of things where the contractors essentially knew there was no way to deliver the system on-time and on-budget. They just seem to build in the fact that once the client realizes it, the sunk cost is high enough they get to have a gravy train for some time to come.
It's not fraud, per se, but it's carefully managing the terms of your engagement with the knowledge the customer will end having to pay more and not really have much of a choice.
Sadly, it almost seems to be standard practice in the industry.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It is one thing to say that the spec is incomplete, but when the spec is bad there is not much a developer can do. If you are told to make the wrong thing, well, either you make the wrong thing or someone else will be paid to do so. There is only so much a developer can do in that situation.
Palm trees and 8
And I think in most of those examples we have agreed that no matter how much it pisses us off and we know it is unethical, companies have no obligation to not rip you off: buyer beware.
The challenge in many of these instances is knowing, at what point, the sales rep is lying. Yes, you can go to Best Buy and buy a $50 HDMI cable. Even if it's the least expensive one they carry, it doesn't mean that they lied to you by not carrying a $5 or $10 cable. If the "speed up your pc by clicking this button" thing is attempted, and it doesn't speed up the computer, what's the difference between that button not working on that particular machine (but has worked on others), vs. a generally-well-meaning technician who genuinely can't get any meaningful amount of performance enhancement out of three hour's worth of work? Answer: the folks behind "the button" went into the deal /knowing/ that their button didn't work (or, at best, worked at a lower rate than their claims), the tech did not. Your Comcast example also involves a lie, albeit one that hinges upon the definition of "need". The warranty situation would obviously be obnoxious to not cover damage that the salesman led the buyer to believe it covered, but if the salesman said "it covers X", when only W, Y, and Z are covered, it's fraud.
Unethical companies are obviously under no obligation to cost themselves money to the benefit of their customers. However, it is a core tenet of the buyer/seller relationship for advertisements to be accurate, and promises to be upheld. Without these expectations in place, it's impossible to conduct good business, for buyers would pay with fool's gold, and sellers would sell snake oil. The word "scam", almost by definition, indicates that these expectations have not been met.
Should change their name to Treacle.
Though to me it seems that if you sold used cars like you sold software you would go to prison. If you sold real estate like you sold software you would go to prison.
As in:
"Hey buddy. I'll sell you a car. Sort of like the ones on the lot, but different and better. No not in stock yet be can have real soon. We'll need some money up front. Should have it in a few days. Thanks for the cash. But we've been having some problems at the auctions. It turns out we have to hire someone to go to the auctions. To do that we'll need a bit more cash. Great news we got a great car for you! But we need to ship it. We don't want to risk damaging it. We'll need a little more cash. Darn, we forgot about the shipping insurance but hey, you already own the car so we might as well get it here. Thanks for the cash. Great news it's here! Try it out. What, it's a right hand drive? You didn't specify, sorry we didn't ask. But there are kits we can install for just a few bucks more. If you want to we can subscribe you to upgrades and maintenance for a small fee. And check out those nice new floor mats! Oh, sorry, we didn't realize it was only running on 7 cylinders. But hey, we can fix it. Sorry, the warranty doesn't cover that but we will throw in a free tank of gas. Thanks and if you tell everyone how great we are we will throw in an extra year of maintenance for free!"
Software companies are below the slimiest of used car salesmen.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Well there's the problem right there... they only paid 43 Million dollars. I think that's enough to buy one license of Oracle DB... for maybe a week or so...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
They built the ability to search through plans. It was verifying data, allowing for applications. Or for that matter of any further use. Healthcare.gov does more than just list plans by type and state.