Quote Originally Posted by d_stranz View Post
I have not worked on medical software per se, but I have worked with companies who manufacture medical or clinical instruments. Software is software, but what makes medical device software different is the degree to which the software must be designed, documented and tested, tested, and more tested. Anything which will be used in a human health setting must meet rigorous safety requirements - at no time can the instrument or software fail in a way that puts the health and safety of a patient at risk. Even devices which aren't directly used in treating patients (such as clinical blood testing devices) must adhere to safety and reliability requirements, because decisions will be made based on the results reported by those devices which can affect human health. Software running on networked devices is even more critical, because it must be hardened against external attacks.

From a developer's point of view, you have to "up your game" and write code to a higher standard. Practice defensive coding. Don't assume that parameters passed to a method are within valid ranges, for example. Check them and assert so that the error can be tracked down during testing. Force if / else conditions to fail so that you can test the else clause to ensure it is doing the right thing even if "the 'else' condition could never happen". And so on.
I totally agree. Stuff that has something to do with health and safety pretty much require numerous test runs before reproducing it or releasing them in the market.

The reason I asked if anyone has tried developing EHR software is that I'm stooped with the rising number of EHR vendors in the market and it got me thinking whether or not it'll require supplemental education or additional studies to get into this type of business.