Best Practices, n.: Making the same mistakes everyone else does.

However, what are the odds of someone being able to make special-purpose machines to do everything COTS boxes are used for, and making those machines as fast, cheap, and reliable as COTS systems are now? Some things seem obvious (x-ray machines, lab machines) but accounting and record-keeping? Going back to adding machines and purely manual filing is not an option in a large hospital, especially if it has to maintain modern standards of patient care over a large patient population.