Healthcare data programs fail for predictable reasons.
The size of the organization, the amount of money thrown at the project, even the expertise of company leadership – none of these offer protection from failure.
A $50 million program becomes a $150 million trauma. A three-year timeline stretches to seven. Senior leaders lose their jobs. Products get rewritten. There are pivots after pivots. Apps get built that clinicians simply won’t use.
I’ve spent years working inside programs like this. At large healthcare providers, at national health data initiatives, at life sciences and pharma companies trying to unify data that was never designed to be unified. The failures I kept seeing weren’t random, and they were rarely caused by architectural or coding mistakes. They were business failures.
My new book documents one such failure in detail.
The Clinical Data Failure – A post-mortem of a $360 million data platform.
It follows a fictitious multi-billion dollar health and life sciences company across seven years. It covers the board-level decisions that started the program, the architecture that failed in production, the HIMSS demo that made promises the platform couldn’t support, the rolling extensions that replaced people and teams every year, and the partial recovery that arrived too late to save the program.
The failure patterns are real. The company is not. Every decision in the narrative was made by reasonable people with the information available to them. That’s what makes it instructive rather than a cautionary tale about incompetence.
If you lead, sponsor, or govern large healthcare data programs, this book is for you.
Expected late 2026.
Sign up for your advance copy: https://darrendevitt.com/the-clinical-data-failure/
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