There has been lots of reports about “badly engineered” software in health care. Clearly, the health care domain is complex, but is it really more complex than for example the airline industry (which also mostly runs on software by now – and with a very good track record)?
The Software Engineering (SE) research community has had a series of venues (conferences and workshops) targeted to “Software Engineering in Health Care” (SEHC). One of these venues has been co-located with the Intl. Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) since 2008. This year, ICSE (and the SEHC workshop) is located in San Francisco. There is a common theme in all presentations on the morning of the first day, which tries to answer the question: Is SE in Health Care really substantially difference from SE in *x* (where x could be any other domain that software has been successful in).
Our lab has a paper at the workshop arguing that SEHC is indeed different from SE[x] and that we need to explicitly focus on knowledge translation in order to increase our impact.