I think health care facilities get sold a package of integrated software and hardware, especially if it was 'state of the art' as joemikeb describes. The people buying it are impressed by the efficiency, don't understand programming, but see a lot of expensive hardware and feel they got value for their money. It seems to me the money was put in the wrong place because of a marketing decision. The programming was just to tie all the hardware together. Bean counters don't want to pay extra for things they can't see, but I bet they were angry when they spent all that money on all this expensive 'hardware' and then had a catastrophic failure.
In defense of the hospitals the integrated data systems are a highly effective defense against all too frequent
medical mistakes that at best cost literally billions of dollars in insurance premiums and drive up medical costs and at worst result in unnecessary injury or death of patients. Hospitals are, by their very nature risky places to be, but these systems do help mitigate some of that risk. In my recent hospitalization I saw countless examples of that risk mitigation at work and I was impressed and happy to see it at work. Of course that very integration introduces other risks. As has been so often postulated, "
There aint no free lunch.
