This is probably the most trite argument on any software forum, but based on my admittedly limited experience working in a hospital research environment, Windows is a serious limiting factor for medical practitioners.
Not because it's a bad operating system, but because hospitals are constantly out of money and computer upgrades are never a high priority. Microsoft does a decent job of backwards compatibility with software, but the hardware requirements keep piling up. Windows has no equivalent of LXDE; the computer in the hallway takes 15 minutes to boot on Windows 7. It's a situation I run into over and over: the damn thing is slow.
It doesn't help that, as others mention, medical software is rarely built with the quality of software engineering we're accustomed to seeing. But it can't help that the software tries to display all of the information graphically and show as much as possible at once -- pictures I have to wait to load even if I don't need to see them. This comes back, probably, to how it's sold: look at this impressive flashy window with all these bells and whistles. Never mind the system resources, and don't get me started on wasting screen real estate. My workflow begins: turn on the computer, wait, log in, wait, open SNC Patient, wait some more...
I don't know how many billable hours are spent waiting for computers to load, but it can't be trivial.
Not because it's a bad operating system, but because hospitals are constantly out of money and computer upgrades are never a high priority. Microsoft does a decent job of backwards compatibility with software, but the hardware requirements keep piling up. Windows has no equivalent of LXDE; the computer in the hallway takes 15 minutes to boot on Windows 7. It's a situation I run into over and over: the damn thing is slow.
It doesn't help that, as others mention, medical software is rarely built with the quality of software engineering we're accustomed to seeing. But it can't help that the software tries to display all of the information graphically and show as much as possible at once -- pictures I have to wait to load even if I don't need to see them. This comes back, probably, to how it's sold: look at this impressive flashy window with all these bells and whistles. Never mind the system resources, and don't get me started on wasting screen real estate. My workflow begins: turn on the computer, wait, log in, wait, open SNC Patient, wait some more...
I don't know how many billable hours are spent waiting for computers to load, but it can't be trivial.