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

[slimjim8094]

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.

Re:Run your own NTP if it matters

[NatasRevol]

Tinfoil hats, third level, on the right.

Re:Run your own NTP if it matters

[tqk]

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.

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.

Re:Run your own NTP if it matters

[Kenja]

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.

Re:Run your own NTP if it matters

[X0563511]

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.

Re:NTP and hospitals

[macemoneta]

Holy hell, what about no? There's a huge reason why hospitals try to keep off networks, especially public ones. Do you really want to connect all the timing devices in a hospital to an outside public server? Because running it yourself does no good, it can just fuck up all the devices in the hospital.

NTP does not require access to public networks. Private time servers, usually GPS sourced via rooftop antennas, are very common.