"COVID-19 tests are going unused due to hospital IT challenges"

This is for the US, but I suspect the problem is the same elsewhere; hospitals not wanting to work with external providers who have the capacity, but not the right software to interface https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/how-hospital-it-challenges-are-holding-back-covid-19-testing-efforts/

"I show up in a magic ship, with 20,000 free kits and CLIA and everything, and the major hospitals say: 'Go away, we cannot interface with you.'"

I am kind of rolling my eyes at the surprise shown here, since it shouldn't be surprising, but this is the reality of healthcare IT.

Also, there seems to be a distinct lack of understanding for the fact that hospitals are probably inundated with 'well-meaning offers' from all sorts of organisations and individuals, and that handling that in a timely manner while they're already under stress is unrealistic.

Which is basically the thing that shows up in every 20/20 hindsight evaluation that I've seen so far; the fact that most organisations are incapable of moving this quickly when it is outside of their regular purview, and that this gets overridden through actions by individuals.

This is true for every organised group of humans, by the way, including so-called 'agile' startups and such, and increases with size of the group, making it often very difficult to get through to anyone who is willing to consider a problem as something they might need to act on.

As long as it's not the normal thing you expect, and thus have a process for that can escalate it, even the initial response can often take days, weeks, or even months.

True in incident response, of which this pandemic is an example, but also for the preparations for such.

It's especially true if someone is not convinced of the urgency of the reported issue, or the scale of the possible impact is such a vulnerability is exploited.

Anything that depends on IT systems during a pandemic is basically a one-two punch, in that regard, a double.

Which should really not come as a surprise after all these stories about hospitals getting cryptolockered, to be honest.

But hey, keep being aghast at the failures now, when you didn't want to listen when building in resilience was still possible

I can basically talk about examples of this all day long, at this point. And if you are actually interested in preparedness, resilience, and so forth, whether it's ops, or operations in general, let's talk.

In the meantime, see also this thread; https://twitter.com/sindarina/status/810605595275522048