Impressions on polish healthcare IT

Well... it is damn sad and painfuly true that polish healthcare IT in XXI century (both staff, infrastructure and management) is still pretty lame...

The IT staff

Form my work experience in Poland the IT guys in hospitals are the most incompenent and most unpleasant kind of people. That is provided there are any, because there is often networking/database infrastructure that runs there by itself without much care or supervision (apart from some less ignorant doctors, who at least do backups (sometimes)).

Medical systems (databases)

Form my obsevation (however I'm not that much of an insider) there are almost as many different systems (like databases + applications) as there are hospitals * their departments. There is no consistency and no interoperability. These systems often don't even talk to each other despite standards like HL7, DICOM or even good old plain CSV. And a lot is "stored" on paper only (not also but only).

(Even more) Painful reality

Recently I've spent 7h waiting just to have a simple medical procedure performed on me.
They said it was going to be up to 4h wait, finally it took 7h, while the procedure itself took only 15 min.
Of which good several minutes was simply filling the paperwork. And it was filled on paper!
Also I was told I can't have the procedure performed by laryngologist without first having referral from first contact doctor. Why would I need a doctor to tell me that my ear is deaf? I know it alredy because I can't hear... Guess what? The only way to get help "quickly" was to go to the ER.

What a load of crap!