Your Code Is About to Run in a Hospital

Your team has won a contract, and the feature you have been building for three months will go live on a hospital ward next month. Nurses will use it to see which patients are due their medication. Somewhere in the last week this stopped feeling like a project and started feeling like a weight. What if you got something wrong?

That feeling is not a sign you are the wrong person for the job. It is a sign you understand what the job is. The engineers I would worry about are the ones who feel nothing at all. The task is not to make the fear go away. It is to turn it into something useful.

Start by writing your worries down. Not a vague dread, but specific questions. What happens if the network drops halfway through an update? What does a nurse see if two people change the same record? What if the clock on the device is wrong? Each worry you can name becomes something you can test, and each one you test becomes a little less frightening.

Then go and talk to the people who will use it. Ask a nurse to walk you through a shift. You will learn what matters in that room, which is often not what the specification emphasised. You will also see how many other checks already exist around your software. Hospitals are full of them, because people there have been thinking about mistakes for a long time.

Remember that you are not the last line of defence. There are reviewers, testers, clinical safety staff and a whole process designed to catch what any one person misses. Your job is to do your part carefully and to speak up loudly if you think something is unsafe. It is not to carry the whole system alone in your head.

And if you do find something worrying close to launch, say so, even if it delays things. Nobody in healthcare will thank you for staying quiet to protect a date.

Afterwards, find out how it went. Ask for feedback from the ward. Hearing that something you built made a busy night slightly easier is one of the best things this work can give you.

The weight you feel is care. Let it make you thorough, not frozen.

– Asael Shinder