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."

Comments

Run your own NTP if it matters

[tepples]

Why can't the medical devices be hardcoded to use an NTP server on the hospital's LAN?

Re:Run your own NTP if it matters

[sjames]

In many cases, consistency between two clocks and moving at the correct rate is FAR more important than absolute correctness. For example, it hardly matters if the hospital's clocks all think it's Feb 3rd 213AD so long as you know that the patient's last dose was 3 hours ago. If the clock in the patient's room thinks it's an hour later than the one in the recovery room, that could matter.