Don't get sick Sunday night. I just got an email from one of the big hospital chains in town that starts out
System Outage Notification
On November 1 the electronic data system will be unavailable from 1:00 am DST to 2:00am CST
At 0050 on Nov. 1st all facilities will be on Downtime procedures to allow the duplicate hour to pass, preventing duplicate data or data with the incorrect time to post to a patient's Electronic health Record (EHR).
During the downtime:
You'll still be able to view information but nothing new will be posted.
If tests are done during the downtime, the results won't be view able until after 0200.
For immediate updates, please contact your patient's nurse.
Don't enter orders on computerized physician order entry. Staff won't have access to the system during the downtime.
More, including background for the poll, below the fleur-de-kos.
Apparently the Electronic Health Record system can't cope with the changeover from daylight savings time to standard time, so they're just going to put the whole system to sleep "to allow the duplicate hour to pass". Or maybe for longer; I think the official time change is at 2am daylight savings time, at which time the clock should 'fall back' one hour to 1am standard time. If they're going to turn the EHR system's clock off at 0050 DST, it'll be down for 2 hours and 10 minutes before the clock should go back on at 0200 standard time.
This will probably be a big mess. But my even uglier thought is that if other hospitals try to keep their electronic medical record systems on during the time change, that could make an even bigger mess.
For a different tune in the same off key, tonight ebay is "upgrading" their computer system. I tried to access my wish list and my purchase history. Zip -- they didn't exist. I see ebay says they're going to be down from 2200 to 2215 Pacific time, but they were already down at 2100 central time, which is 1900 Pacific (isn't it?). I just hope everything is there again when the system is back up.
Years ago I saw some advice about computerizing something. It went, "Get a good computer system with good software, and a good manual backup system. Then install the backup system and bag the computers." I hope the hospital has a good manual backup system. I don't do hospital work any more, so I'll have to ask other docs how it went. But I can't imagine ebay or Amazon could ever use a manual backup system -- that would be like going back to the Sears and Roebuck mail order catalog of the early 20th century.
To err is human, but if you want to get things fucked up royally, use computers.