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Subject:RE: Outrageous: Was Pray for me From:"Joy S. Kocar" <jsk -at- isolns -dot- com> To:"Tim Altom" <taltom -at- simplywritten -dot- com>, "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 24 Jul 2000 12:43:52 -0400
> I appreciate the FDA's role as reviewer, not as direct agent, but
> the point
> still remains...if the company itself is so heedless of user needs, are we
> not contributing to the potential for harm when we advise a
> colleague how to
> kludge a help file that will almost certainly, even in the best scenario,
> not be particularly useful, and in the worst actually endanger a
> user? It's
> easy to say "The company carries that liability" but that would
> be hard for
> me to use as a personal defense if my work in any way contributed to a
> patient's disabling or demise.
You make a valid point. Of course we don't want the documentation to cause
harm to the operator or the patient. When I read the original post, I
understood it to mean that they had a 400 page document that they wanted to
have available online. The document was written completely in Normal style
with formatting changes done manually, not using heading styles, etc. This
is not to say that the document has no structure. Nor does it mean that the
document is inaccurate.
Slapping a document online is not necessarily a help system, just a document
in electronic form that is searchable. Not very useful but it is no more
harmful than a printed document. I didn't interpret from the original post
that the source document was erroneous, just formatted manually.
Adding context sensitivity however, is a different story because then it
becomes part of the software and should be tested and validated.