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Technology Stocks : Year 2000 (Y2K) Embedded Systems & Infrastructure Problem -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Ounce who wrote (333)	4/27/1998 2:28:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 618

Subject: Re: Healthcare Year 2000 issues -- poor attendance at presentation From: kiyoinc@ibm.XOUT.net (cory hamasaki) Date: 1998/04/27 Message-ID: <Jv14mTE62UeG-pn2-25N2VpodgY4X@localhost> Newsgroups: comp.software.year-2000 [Subscribe to comp.software.year-2000] [More Headers] On Mon, 27 Apr 1998 00:09:54, bks@netcom.com (Bradley K. Sherman) wrote: > >doctor, and according to his wife (a computer programmer!) the United > >States has this issue well under control but the rest of the world is far > >behind the U.S. He wasn't aware of any potential impact on healthcare. > > This is bogus beyond belief. Most of the world has limited or no > medical care. The limited medical care involves no computers. > Where computers are involved, there is almost no date information. > The main exception is in billing systems, which I freely admit > may crash and burn. Even in industrialized nations, most health > care does not involve a computer with date functions (save for > billing). Now, it is possible that there is test equipment > with the dreaded "embedded real-time-clock with invisible > date functions with Y2K rollover problems" but the possibility > is not a probability. It is not true that CPU == Y2K-problem. > > If power, water and telecom shut down, we're in a big mess. But > this is true of any sector, not healthcare in particular. > > --bks > This is bogus beyond belief. I was the chief programmer on two medical instrumentation projects. We used standard IBM-style PC's to drive the lab equipment (a microtiter plate reader) though the RS-232C ports. Our competitors all used IBM-style PC's. One company spray painted the machines to match their instruments. Another built a shelf inside their system and hid the IBM-style PC there. We used standard off the shelf OS's, compilers, databases to construct these special purpose "embedded" systems. I have also looked inside hospital autoclave's, been inside them in a manner of speaking. An autoclave looks like a large stainless steel wall mounted oven. It has computer controls that record everything; it's all a legal record, liability you see. If you go down the hall, there will be a locked, unmarked door. That's the door to the autoclave. Behind the door is a bunch of steam pipes, power cables, and channel iron that holds up the back end of the beautiful stainless steel box... only it doesn't look as nice and high-tech as the front. The back is just an insulated box with fairly crude plumbing. The point of the visual detail is to let you know that I've been there. The reason I was there was that procedural... sequencing... problems were preventing the instruments from being properly sterilized. The reason they knew that there were problems was that the infection rate was spooling up. Are we going to have sterilization failures? Absolutely. Sterilizing medical instruments is very complicated. It's all computer controlled and it's all at risk. Even more than IT, the dumbing down has hit healthcare. The only thing that has kept healthcare from collapsing are the computer controls and safety checks. When the computers fail, hospitals and labs will filled by befuddled and confused people. They won't know what to do. None of the work is done by people with checksheets and stopwatches. It's done by computers, mostly standard off the shelf IBM-style PCs. I don't know if a doc off the street would appreciate this. The people to talk to are the old, over 40 year old, lab managers. If you can find a grumpy one, you have a chance of getting the true scoop. Remember last year we had that ya-hoo with the know-it-all wife who used to be an AF ICBM launch officer; they thought ICBM's wouldn't have a problem. You gotta ask the right people the right questions. cory hamasaki