A little tidbit today from
stayhealthy.com
The Clock is Ticking
By: Sara Kies
Freelance Writer
Unless you have spent the last few years in a cave, you have witnessed the term
"Y2K" become a part of your everyday life. It's all over the television, it's on the radio, it's
plastered on the Internet, and it is strung throughout thousands of newspapers around
the world. Rumors about what will happen to our society after January 1, of the year
2000 range from mild inconvenience to life-threatening catastrophe. Yet, with all of this
concern and confusion, the problem still continues to haunt us. We are interested in the
impact of Y2K on our cars, banks and homes, but we cannot forget how this problem
may affect our health care systems.
The Problem
Computers are everywhere in our society. They are a part of our vehicles, washing
machines, airplanes, stereos, telephones--the list goes on and on. But just because the
items we use in everyday life contain computer chips, doesn't mean they will be affected
by Y2K. The devices most affected by this issue are those that use dates to operate.
Roy L. Simpson explains the Y2K problem in his article Reengineering for a New
Millennium: The Year 2000 Problem in Health Care by stating, "Most of the large
computer systems built in the past 20 years were programmed to store only the last two
digits of any date's year and assumed the first two digits of the year as '19'. Back when
these systems were designed and disk space was expensive, storing only the last two
digits of the year saved space." Most people assumed the systems of the day would be
obsolete--and therefore replaced--long before the year 2000 (p24). Y2K is not a big
concern for manufacturers and industries that have already redesigned their technology.
But according to CNN, "the Senate report said that the health care industry overall was
actually one of the worst prepared and said that it posed significant potential for harm".
There are a variety of reasons why the health care industry is so far behind in
precautionary measures, but lack of time, money, and information are all factors.
According to ABC News, "The FDA estimates that 2,700 of the 16,000 medical device
manufacturers have products that could be affected by the glitch. But the agency said it
has received reports on safety and repair plans from only about 500 of those firms". The
Food and Drug Administration cannot force device manufacturers to announce
problems with their technology before they start, and although the FDA is putting
pressure on these manufacturers, many of them are not responding. Another huge
problem for the health industry is the cost of preparing for a problem of this magnitude.
"It [the health industry] is a $1.5 trillion industry. There are 6,000 hospitals, 800,000
doctors, and 50,000 nursing homes…. And also billing systems. There are 38 million
Medicare recipients generating bills of $1 billion per day. So this is a big job" CNN.
Industry experts estimate that the total cost to update all computer systems would be as
much as $600 billion worldwide (Simpson 94).
The Effects
There has been speculation regarding the effect Y2K will have on the health care
industry; the hardest hit areas are expected to be medical devices, clinical, and clerical
systems. According to Ann Reilly Dowd and James Ramage of the Kiplinger's Personal
Finance Magazine, "Some [medical devices] contain date-sensitive chips or rely on
date-sensitive computer systems to analyze medical information. For example, while
pacemakers do not contain such chips, the computers used to analyze how they are
performing do…and although defibrillators-used to resuscitate heart-attack victims-will
work on January 1, 2000, printouts of the details of the procedure could be flawed if
date-sensitive features are not fixed" (104).
Clinical procedures and billing methods are also affected. "One big problem facing
clinical systems is the miscalculating of ages, which will lead to errors in clinical and
diagnostic procedures and other such data dependent on dates" (Simpson 94). The
result of these problems could lead to significant long-term problems in the future. Many
companies in the health industry may be looking to "integrate medical devices with an
electronic patient record", if the dates are inaccurate due to the Y2K effect, this
procedure will be impossible to accomplish CNN.
Another area affected by Y2K is the clerical area within the health care industry. Joel
Willemssen of Congress's General Accounting Office told lawmakers that the Health
Care Financing Administration, which helps pay medical bills for more than 70 million
people, could experience computer system crashes and errors January 1. GAO said,
billions of dollars in federal Medicare and state-administered Medicaid health benefits
could be delayed, miscalculated or go unpaid, leaving the poor, elderly and sick without
the money to pay their doctor bills.
Conclusion
One aspect that needs to be remembered in regards to the Y2K issue is that
technological problems may not necessarily start on January 1, 2000. Some forms of
technology may see the effects sooner. For example, businesses that bide by a fiscal
year calendar will see problems in July if they have not wiped out the 'millennium bug'. It
is also important to remember that although we may have dealt with problems like this in
the past, we have never had to deal with one on this great of a scale. It is hard to predict
something that we have never experienced; therefore, it is harder yet to fix problems that
come with it. Only time will tell what affect Y2K will have on the health industry, but so far
there appears to be too little progress, and the clock in ticking…
Sources
Dowd, Ann Reilly and James Ramage. Will Y2K Spark a Worldwide SOS? Kiplinger's
Personal Finance Magazine, Jan 1999 v53 il p104(1).
Simpson, Roy L. Reengineering for a New Millennium: The Year 2000 Problem in Health
Care. Nursing Administration Quarterly, Fall 1998 p94(1).
cnn.com
cnn.com
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