Debugging Healthcare: A Programmer’s Prospective

Ben Wilkins / Jul 27th / Comments

When I wrote my first real computer program in college, I knew that my career choice was going to be a love-hate relationship. I enjoy the challenge of creating solutions in the most efficient way possible, but unfortunately, troubleshooting is part of the process.

Most programming languages include some form of debugging capabilities. If something breaks in an application, the programmer usually knows quickly exactly what piece of code is causing it to break without having to go line by line through the whole application. However, there are times when you go to the code that is broken, but you can’t find any errors. What then?

That’s where our healthcare system is right now. There are several “bugs” that are causing the system to break. Each function may seem stable, but the errors still remain. Costs are too high, insurance has too many cracks, critical information is too hard to access for patients, etc. But what is causing these errors? I don’t have the answers, but here are some troubleshooting methods that I’ve learned over the years that might be beneficial to those who may:

Step 1: List out the errors

Simply stating that the healthcare system is broken and needs to be fixed will not help anyone fix the problem. Identify specifically what is broken. I can’t count the number of times someone has come to me and said something along the lines of “Your Web site is broken,” when they should have said “I clicked a link on your Web site, and I received an error that says [insert error].” Consumer Reports has written a report identifying some of the errors in our healthcare system.

Step 2: Prioritize the errors

Some errors may be more urgent than others, and some may be easier to fix. This is a similar approach to that of an E.R. A triage nurse in an emergency room quickly determines which patients are in the most immediate need of care. If Patient A has a broken leg and Patient B is having a stroke, Patient B jumps ahead of Patient A. We need to triage what’s broken in the healthcare system.

Step 3: Find the root problem

This is where it gets tricky. It’s easier to find the root problem in code than it is in a nationwide system. However, the same principles apply. Start with the most obvious place and work from there. For example, “The cost of care is too high” is our error. What is driving up the cost, and what is connected to that?

Step 4: Implement a solution

Once you’ve identified the problem, fix it. Again, this is more difficult in healthcare than in programming, but it’s still not impossible. If you don’t know the solution right away, do a little research. Find out how others have implemented similar solutions. As a programmer, a quick Google search can usually solve my problem if I don’t know the answer. In healthcare, it may take looking at other industries, other countries and their healthcare system, other companies, etc until you find a solution to the problem that makes sense.

Step 5: Repeat

Chances are that fixing one error might give you three more. That’s ok. Continue through these steps until you have no errors. When finished, you’ll have a system that is far more stable than what you had before.