>>What you write is exactly what I hear from FoxInCloud users or future users - they feel like general practitioners facing modern medicine.

LOL. Ironically, modern medicine itself is all about simplification, specialization and delivery of extra services for customers. It's true that growth in medical knowledge considerably exceeds technology except in times of war, but the extra knowledge is about things that impact directly on customers, not massive extra complexity for its own sake.

As an example, a modern ECG machine guides any novice to place leads, takes the measurements and reads the result before uploading to the EHR. In my day you had to know why it works so as to be sure to place leads properly on a patient covered in other equipment and then you had to read a paper strip spooling from a machine. IOW the modern machine encapsulates serious new technology to deliver major efficiency and reliability benefits to free up experts and benefit the patient. If this were IT, the cardiograph would do exactly what it did a decade ago except it would be prettier, larger and a lot more complicated on the inside. And that is the problem. There is enormous activity and churn that makes IT people feel they are progressing and being effective, but if the output is the same stuff in a different colored packet, it's a failure.

At the same time, there's major administrative churn in every healthcare system in the world as managers struggle to control costs. Clever management ideas come and go. Sometimes this churn does impact positively on patients, sometimes negatively- but there's almost universal disdain from frontline practitioners when resources are greedily consumed to "manage" things if it mostly consists of erecting and dismantling exciting ideas. Seems to me that this is where IT has lost itself- in the fascination with exciting experimental ways to get it done rather than delivering something extra to justify the cost. Major sections of development have turned into a hobby club where practitioners expect to be paid to experiment with firefly technologies. And we should expect the same result: if they haven't already, customers will turn away from this self-serving mess in disgust.