We have several medical facilities on the slate for 1Q, so I'll keep an eye out for that sort of thing. HIPPA should be bringing that practice to a close though. I've seen a few of the programs that you are referring to in my Sys Admin days making calls to doctors offices and such, and judging by the amateurish quality that I witnessed, I don't doubt what you say at all. Most of my experience has been with large Enterprise type programs, and had they required administrator access to operate they never would have made it past a cursory look.
There I agree. However, most small medical practices are using software that "just growed" from an old DOS base. Some is still running in a DOS window. Others have been Windowfied... but poorly and won't work in anything below administrator. Try and get the doctors to spend the money to switch their entire offices over to something more modern. The cost is not just the package but data conversion for thousands of patients, learning curve and training time for staff and doctors, converting billing forms and often reminder notices, etc.
One popular Chiropractic package stores all of the Patient files directories in the server's root directory. Can't change it. Dumb. All workstations have to have admin rights to the server. Dumber.
Quickbooks, the most popular small business accounting package until recently would not work in anything but administrator or Power User mode. With 2007, they took a step backwards and require admin rights in Windows except in Vista unless you have an upgraded extra-cost Multi-user install. They'll probably fix it fairly quickly. HP's all-in-one Printer driver requires Admin rights to work... they say they are working on it. Stamps.com requires Admin rights. Photoshop Elements changes the folder it installed into to Full Administrator level access... and all subfolders in that folder. Don't want to put this in your Windows/Programs files. Apple bad: apparently iTunes requires Admin. There are a lot more.
The HIPAA laws have some doctors going crazy. An enterprising entrepreneur went through my area and sold a lot of medical office little HIPAA security shutters to mount on all their computer monitors.... the staff were supposed to close the shutters whenever they left their workstations. Ridiculous. I just set up my clients with a screen saver that comes on after no activity for a specific period and requires a password to clear. Much cheaper (The shutters were $49 per workstation for 15" and $79 for 17"). A local MIR lab bought about 40 of these shutter pairs.
For a lot of the med offices, I just pointed out that reading the small print on their screens from public access areas would require binoculars... and added that there are only six HIPAA inspectors for the entire State of California, all of them in Southern California.