Modern medicine requires computers. You literally cannot provide medical care in a critical care setting with the sophistication and speed required for modern critical care without electronic medical records. Fall back to paper? Ok, but you fall back to 1960s medicine, too.
Why would you ever need to move a patient from one hospital room containing one set of airgapped computers into another, containing another set of airgapped computers?
Why would you ever need to get information about a patient (a chart, a prescription, a scan, a bill, an X-Ray) to a person who is not physically present in the same room (or in the same building) as the patient?
Local area networks air gapped from the internet don't need to be air gapped from each other. You could have nodes in each network responsible for transmitting specific data to the other networks.. like, all the healthcare data you need. All other traffic, including windows updates? Blocked. Using IP still a risk? Use something else. As long as you can get bytes across a wire, you can still share data over long distances.
In my eyes, there is a technical solution therr that keeps friction low for hospital staff: network stuff, on an internet, but not The Internet...
Edit: I've since been reading the other many many comment threads on this HN post which show the reasons why so much stuff in healthcare is connected to each other via good old internet, and I can see there's way more nuance and technicality I am not privy to which makes "just connect LANs together!" less useful. I wasn't appreciating just how much of medicine is telemedicine.
I think wiring computers within the hospital over LAN, and adding a human to the loop for inter-hospital communication seems like a reasonable compromise.
Yes there will be some pain, but the alternative is what we have right now.
> nobody wants to do it.
Tough luck. There's lots of things I don't want to do.
