Glitch costly for O.C. - Orange County California

The Orange County Register ^ | February 13, 2004 | TONY SAAVEDRA, MAYRAV SAAR and ALDRIN BROWN

[EveningStar]

Orange County's new $11 million computer system to track Medi-Cal bills doesn't work.

Instead, tens of thousands of bills are being processed partially by hand and by an old computer system once labeled by county officials as "obsolete with major deficiencies."

[EveningStar]

Orange County ping

[SoCal Pubbie]

Gee, how much money would we have saved if they HAD thrown out the old system and the payments would not have been made at all?

[proxy_user]

Amateurs contracting with amateurs, plus changing requirements definitions, equals trouble.

[IncredibleHulk]

I went through this whole debacle with Los Angeles County Dept. of Health about 10 years ago. After the County IT Exec's (my bosses) totally ignored my recommendations and screwed up the entire contract, I quit and went to private industry. I'll never work for or with government technology experts again. The frustration and stress will shorten your lifespan and I don't have enough left already!

[IncredibleHulk]

Gubermint technology people are always amateurs or else, more likely, just incompetent. They get their position by outlasting everybody else so the good people go where they can get paid for their abilities at a rate that the government can't afford. Then they come back as high paid consultants but the gubermint people still don't listen unless it is to a slick PR approach that doesn't go over their head from some mostly PR firm with no real expertise. They buy the slick presentation every time.

Then the requirements start changing and the contractor starts adding cost to the project to make the whole thing actually work. The lack of proper requirements planning and failure to look at the contractor's existing body of work, always result in a failure or an exorbitantly over budget product.

[seenenuf]

Thx for the ping. I found out the hard way that commission sales staffs for business computer systems could sell frigs to Eskimos. If they were made to take the financial liability for what they sell - well, the buyer probably couldn't afford the system. Reminds me of the Coldwell Bankers' sales job they did on the previous Treasure of O. C. and the resultant bankruptcy.

[EveningStar]

Linked related article at same site:

Cerner Corp. facts and figures

Name: Cerner Corp.

Headquarters: Kansas City, Mo.

Specialty: Designs computer software for use in hospitals and other health-care settings. Its products aim to replace paper medical records with electronic documents, improving the efficiency of patient care and billing.

Employees: 5,100

Bottom line: The publicly traded company earned nearly $752 million in revenue during 2002, more than double its earnings in 1999.

[GalaxieFiveHundred]

"The reason Cerner was selected was that they had the most fully integrated system," said Pat Markley, spokeswoman for the Health Care Agency.