Software engineering in health care: Is it really different? And how to gain impact

Over the last several years, software engineering (SE) has given birth to several communities and venues related to research on SE in the context of health care systems. By and large, the interest in this topic has been spurred by alarming failures of software-intensive systems that have been deployed to address some of the challenges faced in current health care environments. Today, the software engineering in health care (SERC) community faces several challenges. It needs to justify the significance of its existence towards the general SE community and towards the medical/health informatics community. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the fundamental challenges pertaining to SERC, to consider whether these challenges require a dedicated community-based effort and to generate recommendations on how to strengthen its impact. We argue that the community should adopt a conceptual model of knowledge translation (KT) analogous those used in the medical domain to position its research and maximize its impact.