Sunday, December 12, 2010

Software Engineering for Helping Hospitals

In 2007, at the Monterey Workshop on Requirements Engineering I heard a talk by Lori Clarke, where she presented the number of “preventable errors in hospitals” as indexed by Jumbo Jet crashes.

In 2008 she and co-authors have published a paper at ICSE telling how Software Engineering technology could help tackling this problem. It is a must read. We understand that there is yet a lot that can be done from a software engineering perspective as to meliorate this catastrophe.

Clarke, in her paper, cites 1999 data, which were around 95K lost lives per year. Googling I found a number that is almost twice the 1999 one, by this site the number is 195k! Using the Jumbo metrics, it is like to say that 40 Jumbo Jet do crash per month (195k/400)/12!

Amazing.

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