"Year 2000 bug could bite hospitals hard"
(CMED is not mentioned by name in this article but it looks like they could be busy !)
Senate hearing suggests health sector is in trouble
By Miguel Llanos
MSNBC July 23 -
Senators and experts pounded makers of medical devices Thursday for not doing more to debug their machines of the Year 2000 computer problem. Some examples raised at a special Senate hearing were comical, like the blood-test analyzer that's been trying to reboot itself for 3 1/2 months. Others were deadly serious, like a survey that found 94 percent of one working group see "significant potential" for unnecessary deaths.
THE FOOD AND DRUG Administration was also taken to task for not being "much more aggressive" in getting device makers to be Year 2000 ready.
The hearing by the special Senate committee on the Year 2000 problem followed a recent survey of U.S. health-care groups that concluded that 87 percent are in danger of computer system failures as Jan. 1, 2000, approaches.
Sen. Chris Dodd, a vice-chair of the committee, feared the U.S. health-care system could go into "intensive care" and criticized the medical-device industry of "exacerbating the situation" by not being more cooperative with health groups about problems with their equipment.
Sen. Bob Bennett, a Utah Republican and the committee's chairman, painted an even broader, and scarier, picture. "If tonight when the clock struck midnight the calendar flipped to Dec. 31, 1999, large portions of the health care system would fail," he said in his opening statement. "There are some 6,000 American hospitals, 800,000 doctors, and 50,000 nursing homes, as well as hundreds of biomedical equipment manufacturers and suppliers of blood, pharmaceuticals, linens, bandages, etc., insurance payers, and others that are not yet prepared."
The Year 2000 bug arose from old programming methods that translated years into their last two digits. Thus, for thousands of computers and embedded chips the year 2000 could be misread as 1900. And that could crash systems or spew out bad data - jeopardizing everything from health care to defense systems to telecommunications.
And while the bug can be fixed by rewriting software code or replacing hardware, detecting the bug requires going through billions of lines of code. Moreover, because of the nature of computer systems, a weak link anywhere in a network could bring down the entire system.
"That is the scary thing," Bennett warned Thursday.
FDA OPTIMISM CRITICIZED
Much of the testimony focused on what medical-device makers are doing on the Year 2000 front.
The acting FDA commissioner said the FDA is trying to centralize information from medical-device makers and already lists dozens of types of biomedical devices, from chemical analyzers to medical cameras, that have Year 2000 problems.
Michael Friedman also noted that only 500 of the 2,700 makers of medical devices contacted by the FDA had responded to the agency's request for information about any potential Year 2000 problems.
But Friedman also voiced optimism that the medical-device industry would be able to resolve the problems before 2000.
That drew criticism from Dodd, who said he couldn't understand how the FDA could hold that view given that hundreds of companies hadn't responded. Dodd also demanded that the FDA become "much more aggressive" in dealing with the industry.
And experts from the American Medical Association and Rx2000, a nonprofit health-care consulting group, voiced similar concerns about device makers.
"Some health care institutions," Rx2000 director Joel Ackerman warned in his statement, "intend to rely almost entirely on vendor assurances of compliance, even though experience has proven these to be unreliable."
Ackerman added that a recent survey of an Rx2000 working group found that 94 percent saw "significant potential" for unnecessary deaths.
A recording of the hearing can be heard via the FedNet audio service.
BANKRUPTCIES FEARED AS WELL
On the health-care front, Bennett is also concerned about payments and patient records. "There are health care entities that may very well go bankrupt because they cannot get reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid," he warned earlier this month.
"Forty percent of the health-care dollar in the United States comes from the Health Care Financing Administration," Bennett added. "And HCFA's computers are at this point, according to the General Accounting Office, in terrible shape."
President Bill Clinton himself cited the HCFA as a key area of government concern. "HCFA, which runs Medicare, processes almost 1 billion transactions a year," he noted last week in a speech aimed at drawing attention to the problem. "Its computer vendors must painstakingly renovate 42 million lines of computer code."
TOO LITTLE, SAYS CONSULTANT
The GartnerGroup, an information-technology consulting firm, on Wednesday reported its latest Year 2000 survey found that while the U.S. health sector is finally taking the issue seriously, it is underbudgeting for what it will cost to fix.
"In 1997, the Year 2000 crisis was not even on the radar screen" of the 340 health-care systems profiled, said GartnerGroup research director David Garets. "In 1998, it's overwhelmingly the No. 1 systems issue."
"The good news," he added, is that those groups, known as integrated health delivery systems (IDS) "are finally paying attention to the year 2000; the bad news is that their spending is totally inadequate to address the crisis.
"Our survey shows that the average IDS plans to spend $4.8 million on the Year 2000 problem," he said. "We predict that they'll eventually pay closer to $10 million to $20 million when legal fees, contingency plans, business continuity expenses and project management costs are factored in."
The results followed an earlier GartnerGroup survey that found that 87 percent of all U.S. health-care organizations are in danger of systems failures within the next two years.
PACEMAKER 'RUMOR'
The issue, also known as the Y2K or millennium bug, has also raised fears among pacemaker users.
A recently created presidential Year 2000 council addressed that concern on its Web site, seeking to dispel what it called a "rumor."
"While computer software frequently is embedded as a component of pacemakers, this software does not use date information in the operation of the pacemaker itself," it stated.
The council added, though, that the bug "could affect a few of the external programmers that are used to monitor and/or change pacemaker operating conditions," and that the FDA has alerted manufacturers to "provide solutions or upgrades."
POTENTIAL WORLDWIDE IMPACT
Because the Year 2000 bug could impact computers around the world, some experts are predicting widespread repercussions.
Edward Yardeni, chief economist at Deutsche Bank Securities, is one of the most vocal in predicting a worldwide recession and even has his own Y2K Web site.
"I think there's going to be a recession ... there's simply too many computers that have to be fixed and not enough time," he told NBC "Today" show host Matt Lauer last Tuesday.
Yardeni added that while the United States is ahead of most other nations in tackling the Y2K bug, "the bad news is it's a global community, we depend on everybody."
Source:
msnbc.com |
