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  • It's true that an erroneous invite isn't a particularly bad outcome, but I wonder if there aren't other, worse situations with a similar origin. But yes, I suppose it comes down to the design of the analysis, with the onus being on the developers to implement checks relative to the potential risk! It's presumably known in the medical software industry that patient data is a huge mess of un-validated information, although there have been a few stories of not-precisely-experienced developers contributing to new software in the COVID-era. Commented Feb 17, 2021 at 14:37
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    @SphaericaPullus, yes there's been an extreme loss of common sense in IT about the reliability of data, and people with far too little work experience, and too little access to institutional memory are being left to interpret and summarise data. It's not helped by a belligerent attitude, amongst some involved in IT, that such errors are somebody else's problem (whether the user, the original system designer, etc.), and not their problem to identify in theory or to solve in practice, when in fact people need to be eagle-eyed at every step and treat data with appropriate scepticism by default. Commented Feb 17, 2021 at 17:38
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    And by the time you get to calculating the BMI, it may be to late in the system to do anything about it. You have 2 inputs about the patient, at least one of which is probably wrong, but if this is running in a batch job in the background there may not be anywhere sensible to send an error message. Commented Feb 17, 2021 at 21:21