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Know What Time It Is? Your Medical Device Doesn't
An anonymous reader writes "A man with one clock knows what time it is, goes the old saw, a man with two is never sure. Imagine the confusion, then, experienced by a doctor with dozens. Julian Goldman is an anaesthetist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. After beginning to administer blood-thinning medication during an urgent neurological procedure in 2005, Mr Goldman noticed that the EMR had recorded him checking the level of clotting 22 minutes earlier. As a result, four hospitals in the northeast had their medical devices checked, and found that on average they were off by 24 minutes. The easy solution that devices could have used since 1985? NTP."
NTP does not require access to public networks. Private time servers, usually GPS sourced via rooftop antennas, are very common.
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Easy, get a GPS receiver and use its time. The point is that the times all need to be the *same* (so things that happen at the same time are recorded as such); accuracy is secondary. Even if every week or two some guy goes and fixes the clock on the server, that should be acceptable.
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How would that change anything? It just makes all the clocks on the hospital go wrong when it starts to move to wrong times on the NTP server.
You can have one local timeserver that syncs with external trusted servers (nist.gov). All of your local devices can sync with your local ntp server.
Updating it from public sources is out of question too. Think about someone injecting completely wrong time to the hospital.
NTP is *pull*, not push. We've had decades now to bulletproof NTP. It will be pretty easy to nail an NTP server down so it's only going to be serving NTP.
The medical and legal professions are the most IT challenged disciplines I've ever seen, but that may be largely due to excessive gov't regulation.
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Even if your interpretation of what devices where effected was true, you would still be a crazy person. The act of receiving GPS signals can not be tracked. To track (for example) an insulin pump, you would need a TRANSMITTER in addition to a receiver.
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We've had decades now to bulletproof NTP
... and in fact we've already done so.
There is no excuse for failing to implement it.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...