How the public healthcare system in Italy is using software to support the vaccination effort is appaling.
I’ve spent a good part of the last 30 years trying to convince people that software is important. Of course I was mostly trying to sell something, but I do believe that software is perhaps the most effective leverage homo sapiens has ever created, an incredibly effective multiplier of effort, especially since computers have been connected to a global network.
And while this has been widely understood all around the world for a relatively long time (to put things in perspective, this blog is 19 years old today), decision makers in Italy have never taken this seriously.
Yes, there have been forever companies controlled by the public administration, dedicated to creating software for its citizens, but they have always been a joke. Just huge organisations, filled with mostly mediocre people, with politically nominated leadership which would change at every election.
They have never been able to produce anything even remotely decent: just old technology, hardly working and unusable, simply projecting a bit further the horrible and mind numbing bureaucracy of the state.
Now this software is killing people.
Because while we are locked down and in the middle of a pandemic, after years and years of development, of citizen portals, of centralized booking systems, of call centres, of digitised clinical records, if you think you are at risk and you want to get vaccinated you have to download a bloody pdf.
Then you have to print it.
You fill it up with a pen, trying to remember, find or recover information which you might or might not have access to (but that you know for a fact that it’s stored in multiple databases behind some firewall). Then go to a physical location with your little printed form, queue up, and hope for the best.
I understand the complexity of software. I know that managing large amounts of data across multiple organisations might be difficult. But I also know that it is not that difficult, especially considering the time and money that has been spent.
I can see how the system is working in the UK. It is possible to receive a notification from your GP. It is possible to book online. It is possible to manage all these records in a state of emergency. Of course there have been problems, glitches, bugs and fuck-ups, but overall the system is holding up amazingly well.
In Italy we are witnessing the results of decades of ignorance in power, and frankly I don’t have much hope for change.