Politics and patient safety don´t mix: Understanding the failure of large-scale software procurement in healthcare

President Obama has recently announced an additional $50 billion to support the development of healthcare informatics and electronic patient records systems. Public attention has, therefore, focused on ensuring that such investments do not suffer from the failures that have jeopardised patient safety in previous large-scale software procurements. This paper analyzes recent failures that have affected the Veterans´ Health Administration (VHA); one of the United States´ largest healthcare providers. The following sections trace the technical causes back to software engineering practices and project management techniques. However, the key argument in the paper is that these causes have been obscured by political arguments. It is concluded that by mixing politics and patient safety, there is a danger that we will waste the opportunities provided by new investments in healthcare informatics.