Did that quarter-second lag kill anyone? Was there someone who wouldn’t have died if the ePCR was just a little bit faster, fast enough to be usable? And the people who built it: did they ask the same questions? Did they say “premature optimization is bad” and not think about performance until it was too late? Did they decide another feature for the client was more important than making the existing features faster? Did they even think about performance at all?
This seems like a lot of imagining of scenarios that may or may not have happened. Perhaps another way of looking at this is - did the company hired to build this actually care whether EMTs used their software, or were they looking to get a paycheck?
So many health tech firms fall in the latter bucket. Such is the reality of the business - with huge enterprise sales funnels and hospital networks that don't understand the value of UX & great product (and caring a lot about their bottom line), this result isn't unexpected.