I was recently hospitlized. The EMT took my id card and entered my name incorrectly (YUEK as opposed to YEUK). I told the nurse and she said there is nothing she can do about it until I check out the hospital.

I waited until I checked out the hospital, and the nurse took my information down. For my situation, I have to follow up with specialist. The clinic received my medical information and the referral from the hospital. The clinic also got the typo from the hospital, plus the wrong insurance information, as well as the wrong cell phone number. I was amazed at the wrong insurance (hospital gave them my dental insurance, but I received a notice from my health insurance regarding my hospital admission before I visited the clinic). How funny. When I went back to confirm my appointment a few days later, the clinic said no one correct my name (wtf?).

What a joke. While I was getting admitted into the hospital for a few nights, the nurses had to pair up in order to figure out how to enter data into the system. The program looks like Excel except it isn't. In some cases you have to enter the data in a different column, in some cases you have to enter 0, in some cases you leave it out. The nurses kept saying "oh I remember you have to do this to get around this issue, oh I think you can ignore this option."

When I met with the nurse practitioner the next day, he couldn't log into his system. I told him I work as a DevOps and he was curious about my role. Then he said he has to call the IT support (managed solution) somewhere in Tennessee and all the vendor would say is try again later). Yeah, after meeting 30 minutes he was able to login.

Here is the thing - typo can ruin life, typo can take away money and time for fixing error, can cause divorce and all sorts of other bad things. Insurance, Social Security, government IDs, Diploma, etc.

There is no reason, in my funny but pretty frustrating anecdote, for hospital to run so inefficient, relying on systems built by incompetent people, product dedicated by policy makers or administrators who really are out of touch with real life (they don't use the system).

You know, I am angry, I want to reform hospital software system.