Slashdot Mirror
America Braces For Daylight Saving Time - And Missing Medical Records (usatoday.com)
"One hundred years after Congress passed the first daylight saving legislation, more and more people are doubting the wisdom of changing the clocks," writes PBS, noting that it actually makes Americans use more electricity and consume more gasoline.
"If you can find anyone who supports this, they're probably just trolling you," writes Inc magazine's contributor editor, adding "Literally everyone hates it... It's almost impossible to find anyone who still supports this insane, anachronistic idea, which is leftover from a German coal conservation idea during World War I, and our heck-we'll-try-anything panic during the energy crisis of the 1970s." In fact, one study found that while consumer spending increases a bit at the start of daylight savings, it drops a full 3.5 percent in the wrong direction when it ends. (Which will happen tonight in most U.S. states at 2:00 a.m.)
And now USA Today points out that hospital software "still can't handle daylight saving time: Epic Systems, one of the most popular electronic health records software systems used by hospitals, can delete records or require cumbersome workarounds when clocks are set back for an hour -- prompting many hospitals to opt for paper records for part of the night shift. And it happens every year... Dr. Steven Stack, a past president of the American Medical Association, called the glitches "perplexing" and "unacceptable," considering that hospitals spend millions of dollars on these systems, and Apple and Google seem to have dealt with seasonal time changes long ago...
Carol Hawthorne-Johnson, an intensive care unit nurse in California, said her hospital doesn't shut down the Epic system during the fall time change. But she's come to expect that the vital signs she enters into the system from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday will be deleted when the clock falls back to 1 a.m. One hour's worth of electronic record-keeping "is gone," she said. Hospital staff have learned to deal with it by taking extra chart notes by hand... Many hospitals use Cerner, another major electronic medical records company. Those hospitals plan for Cerner to be down during the time change, too.
"If you can find anyone who supports this, they're probably just trolling you," writes Inc magazine's contributor editor, adding "Literally everyone hates it... It's almost impossible to find anyone who still supports this insane, anachronistic idea, which is leftover from a German coal conservation idea during World War I, and our heck-we'll-try-anything panic during the energy crisis of the 1970s." In fact, one study found that while consumer spending increases a bit at the start of daylight savings, it drops a full 3.5 percent in the wrong direction when it ends. (Which will happen tonight in most U.S. states at 2:00 a.m.)
And now USA Today points out that hospital software "still can't handle daylight saving time: Epic Systems, one of the most popular electronic health records software systems used by hospitals, can delete records or require cumbersome workarounds when clocks are set back for an hour -- prompting many hospitals to opt for paper records for part of the night shift. And it happens every year... Dr. Steven Stack, a past president of the American Medical Association, called the glitches "perplexing" and "unacceptable," considering that hospitals spend millions of dollars on these systems, and Apple and Google seem to have dealt with seasonal time changes long ago...
Carol Hawthorne-Johnson, an intensive care unit nurse in California, said her hospital doesn't shut down the Epic system during the fall time change. But she's come to expect that the vital signs she enters into the system from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday will be deleted when the clock falls back to 1 a.m. One hour's worth of electronic record-keeping "is gone," she said. Hospital staff have learned to deal with it by taking extra chart notes by hand... Many hospitals use Cerner, another major electronic medical records company. Those hospitals plan for Cerner to be down during the time change, too.
The absolute worst part of DST is the stupid semiannual bitchfest on Slashdot.
Anything with Epic in its name is complete festering garbage:
Epic Systems
Epicor
Epipen
And... since you're still reading, Epic Systems gave us a supreme court ruling that will go on to literally kill people:
Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis
Ah... DST, the "every year we have something contentious to sell more ads on!" topic.
Just watch... if anyone gets CLOSE to *really* thinking about removing DST? There will be a tonne of pro-DST articles popping in. Why?
Cause more ads.
No one cares about this, at all. I've never heard anyone, ever, complain. Never.
I've heard people complain *after* reading an article, but only after the rise of ADS ADS ADS on the internet. And most people just ape crap in the article. They don't care personally.
And this? Some blather about what must be the crappiest piece of software ever? No one competent has a problem coding for system time, and their DB layer, unless they're the newest, greenest novice. About the only other people that get it consistently wrong are java bugs from Oracle -- repeatedly, because.. Oracle.
There is zero technical reason to care about DST. None. All the same problems happen if you change timezones when you move. You need to code for UT + timezone anyhow, unless you're incompetent.
Every year with this. Every year. Shut the hell up.
I don't know how many times as a programmer, QA, team lead, sysadmin, and manager I had to pound the concept of Universal Time Coordinates into programmers heads. As well as ntp. Both are critical in real life applications. This is one of many reasons I have come to look upon most programmers with disdain and disgust.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
So.. any comments or stories submitted in the hour before time rolls backwards.. where do they go?
It's like an annual Y2K bug... I'll see you all again soon.. an hour ago.
Apples watch whose sole purpose is telling time managed to brick for 24-hours recently when Australia changed time.
Daylight saving shows how incredibly inefficient governments are. My impression is that people have been against daylight saving for at least two decades, yet the government has been unable to rectify the situation in all that time. How can it take so long to address such a simple problem? It's no wonder that more complex issues go unsolved.
Of course, when the government does take action the solutions imposed are normally catastrophically bad, so maybe it's best they continue with their gross inefficiency.
...and that my friend is what we call acceptable losses by a government who fails to do anything about something so easy to fix. while they talk about it for years and decades, we as programmers have the power to do something... stop it from happening... turn off the DST feature and go to either UTC or just turn the damn feature off on servers and applications. I vote yes, turn off daylight savings time. I am tired of everyone using it as excuse to be late as well, and credit card systems integration encryption hiccuping..
Give someone some LSD tonight and then change the clocks.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I have no data cap, because the tzdata updates come hot and fast every time some state, or random country decides to change their participation in how they manage time.
I just check my phone/computer to set all my dumb appliances (or mechanical clocks) time displays,
But it's going to Standard Time that's the problem, no ? Daylight Saving Time ends today, Standard Time begins.
That can't properly handle the unfortunate, antiquated reality of daylight savings time is written by idiots. The same goes for leap time.
I love the later sunsets at the evenings. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
the Russian Federation stopped changing clocks. And the EU follows this example in 2019.
In fact, it is not complicated, - a government makes a decision and publishes it. This is it, the sanity is back.
not one, but from TWO vendors do not understand the concept of UTC and time zones -- yet they are trusted with sensitive data and critical medical records at times when it is absolutely essential for data to be complete and accurate?
don't tell me they also use '123456' as a hard-coded default admin password, too....
The fall change is excellent, that extra hour of sleep is so nice. The spring change should go though, losing an hour is terrible.
Oh look. I don't even have to read the article to know it's shit because I'm a person and I don't hate it.
Like many, I'd prefer having permanent daylight savings time (an hour more light in the evenings), but having grown up in the north, I know that would've meant waiting for the school bus in darkness each morning, and many parents might not support that. That said, once people get used to it and quit their bitching, they'll probably be fine with it - in the same way there was a huge uproar from smokers when public smoking bans went into effect, which died out rather quickly when they realized it wasn't such a big deal.
www.gaiageek.com
I'm against DST and all but any programmer that relies on human friendly displayed time (eg 1:30) for storing data for mission critical applications like medical records messed up. The data should be stored with timestamps that are unaffected by things like DST and only convert to more human friendly formats when the data is displayed somewhere.
We shouldn't do Daylight Saving Time because.....some hospitals use shitty software written by developers who still can't figure out clock-related bugs after years of trying?
I honestly don't give a damn whether we change the clocks or not but I do like having usable light at 9 PM, however briefly. I'd rather shift time in the Winter so the sun doesn't go down at 5 PM though. I just need to move much farther South so my winters aren't so cold and dark, and everybody can do whatever the F they want with the clocks. Unless you're the aliens from Slaughterhouse V - please don't "play with the clocks" and alter how I experience the passing of time.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
americans: we need to get rid of DST
commerce: jesus christ are you crazy? we use DST for all sorts of marketing voodoo, especially cinemas and evening activities! you might buy less stuff!
americans: not likely. we buy everything online anyway.
commerce: b-but! think of the farmers! they need more time to harvest crops and this time switch gives them more daylight! without DST youll starve the whole country!
farmer: [casually turns the headlights on in the tractor]
Good people go to bed earlier.
UTC is certainly the right time zone to use where you, for some reason, need to store a human-readable string that represents a time. Most of the time relared problems and bugs aren't solved by storing times as UTC, though.
The thing is, you can't get your time calculations right when using year-month-day hour-minute-second format. Almost every professional implementation has had bad bugs. Even if you DID get it bug free, we'd break it after you ship it because we change the rules from time to time.
How many seconds are in a minute?
It's not always sixty seconds.
What time comes after 23:59 59, in UTC.
If you said midnight, as a programmer, you're wrong (sometimes it's 23:59:60 UTC, such as on December 31, 2016).
The way to store times as as an integer since the epoch. Unix, Linux etc set the epoch at January 1, 1970. The current Unix epoch time is therefore 1541311061. (That's how many seconds have elapsed since the epoch). Any recent choice of epoch is fine, unless your concerned about times centuries ago.
When you try to store an manipulate times as strings, you end up with crap like time going backwards, which breaks all kinds of things.
The only sort-of exception is I wouldn't yell at you for using the temporal types in a well-established relational database like MySQL and MS SQL. They do have bugs, and storing it as a number is more accurate, but the Mysql date handling isn't atrocious.
Am I the only one who finds it amusing that America can defend the use of Imperial measurements and yet is it daylights savings that is too hard?
Yea, sorry, mark down as flame bait if you must, but I still find this funny.
In 2018 EU decided to end daylight saving time. Or rather let all nation decide for themselves if they want it or not and thus themselves decide which time zone to be in. https://www.bbc.com/news/world...
Just saying it like it are.
How do they deal with medical transports crossing time zones? Don't they ever keep records on those?
You find this sort of thing in every area which is heavily regulated by big government. Lobbyists get legislators and regulators to put in place a huge volume of rules that no new entrants to the particular market are either able to meet or willing to meet in order to enter the market. The particular niche market then is dominanated by the early entrants who got in before the rules kicked-in (and often lobbied for all the rules, which just happen to align with what they already meet). The result is no actual competition with innovators entering the market, and therefore no competition driving the vendors in the market to get any better, or even maintain their level of competence/performance.
It's not at all surprising that the software hospitals use is this bad; it's entirely predictable and it's actually surprising that these vendore even try as hard as they seem to. The only pressures they will likely feel are the pressures to be not so bad that the congress takes note and changes the laws (they'd have to become monumentally bad for that to happen, given how unlikely congress (no matter which party is in charge) always is to write new and effective laws).
And it gets a lot darker now that we've sprung backwards. Only the Lord of Light can save us now.
In countries south of the 49th parallel, DST is just a PITA. In countries north thereof, it's a way to enjoy the little winter daylight while not being woken by the dawn chorus (that's birdsong for you city-dwellers - birds are pesky things that fly but aren't jets). As for saying programmers don't understand DST, that's about as true as programmers not understanding leap years and the millenium. Programmers get this stuff; it's management who say it's too hard. E.g. MS DOS got it wrong 'cos they were afraid it would spook end users if their system clock wasn't in local time. Unix got it right 'cos it was written by programmers. I hope that when Bill Gates dies, it's in the hour that the clocks go back :-)
consumer spending dropping at the end of summer time ?
or is it consumer spendings dropping before black friday ?
seems like somone at the JPMorgan Chase Institute, reads statistics like the devil reads the bibel !
There's no reason why it needs to be light out at 9:00 on a Summer night.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
No America is about to COME OFF daylight saving time and return to normal time.
Although normal time is "correct" dst is more fun to live in (getting home with some light left)
I see these articles every year here and hatred from Americans about DST when you're infact LEAVING DST right now.
I'm torn here. The incredibly easy fix for the software is to record everything in utc. Local time is just for displaying to the user after all. Duh. On the other hand, I hate the time shift too.
Solar noon, or geographically close to it(time zones), is all that matters.
Everything else is asinine.
Never schedule cron jobs during 1am to 2am unless you like odd behavior.
I instigated this for environmental models two decades ago, and it makes life lots easier. And more error-free.
Of course, there are those DB idiots who won't learn from history, and keep trying to reverse that decision... ;-(
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Daylight Saving Time, The Movie
Doing things in UTC is the way to go.
The complication is deciding when to convert it to local time, and what that local time should be. For example, you're monitoring someone's activity. Should activity be shown in the person's current local time, at the local time of when the activity took place, or in the local time of the person viewing the activity?
You have to make it clear who's time you're talking about.
I agree there is a reason it's called calendar time.
Because it's what people use for calendars.
That's its appropriate use. If we set an appointment for 9:00 AM November 1, 2023, we mean when the clock reads those values - whatever time that happens to be. We don't yet know what time that will actually be (how many seconds away it is) because we don't know whether DST will be in effect.
You're slightly mistaken about epoch time and leap seconds.
Epoch time is how long it has been since the epoch. Epoch time doesn't CARE if calendar time had a leap second or not. Epoch time can't get leap seconds or DST or leap years wrong because there is no school thing in epoch time. What you may havr seen is that someone trying to convert calendar time to epoch time got it wrong. People normally get it wrong in several different ways.
The "word on the street" is that Epic Systems has a high level of employee turnover, in part because of burnout of the persons involved, in part because the company's approach to firing people being that of the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland ("Off with his head!").
I have been told by people who have been out to their Verona, WI campus that there is a wall, where employees reaching their 2-year employment anniversary record their hand prints in plaster. I guess a 2 year anniversary is a big milestone if you work there.
My question is, are those hand prints on the outside pushing in, or are do they appear from the inside of the wall pushing out?
You really have to reach sub-microsecond for anyone to notice.
Though UNIX timestamps avoid DST trouble, using UNIX timestamps for anything sub-second is vulnerable to problems around leap seconds. UNIX timestamps represent UTC imperfectly: they treat instants during the leap second as part of the preceding or following second. The same is true of subtracting UTC times to form an interval, unless your UTC library uses an up-to-date table of historical and announced leap seconds.
I moved to a country with no personal tax and no DST. The best move ever. Sheer bliss.
Now, while that matches up "pretty well" with a day, it doesn't match exactly. The earth wobbles a bit, and is slowly being slowed down by tidal forces - but not in a predefinable way. We need to observe .. and when the difference makes the time we've tracked with atomic clocks be out of sync with the earth - we adjust time. We insert a leapsecond. By decree from a commitee.
This is my philosophical / metaphysical problem with getting rid of leap seconds: what exactly is "a day"? Is it determined by the ticking of a clock, or by the rotation of the Earth?
The folks that want to get rid of leap seconds (for many reasonable, practical reasons) are basically saying that it is "86400 ticks".
I'm of the mind that we are measuring an external reality with our instruments, so "fudging" that observation of reality is bad physics, and that we can't brush the offset under the rug just because it's inconvenient at times.
I love the later sunsets at the evenings. ;)
I like to be able enjoy the sunsets at an earlier hour so I don't have to stay up as "late".
Going to bed earlier allows me to wake up earlier, and enjoy the quiet a bit before the chaos of life starts up.
I'm surprised that the heathcare industry doesn't start a federal lawsuit to get daylight saving time repealed. The lost hour could result in massive malpractice lawsuits given the proper circumstances. Doctor:"Where's the patient's x-ray done at 01:30" Hospital:"What? there is no record of a x-ray being done." You get the idea.
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
It is not tilt.
It is not atmosphere; else the stars and moon would be similarly affected.
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
As usual, Slashdot is six months behind.
Have gnu, will travel.
I loathe DST for several reasons, and I'll not blather on about all of them.
Having numerous clocks about the place is high on the list tho.
I could understand why folks wanted it, sure, back when a lot of folks depended on daylight to see in their offices and businesses. Farmers, of course, didn't need it, they lived by the sun anywho. For me, even at >70(OTD), and most folk today, it's at best pointless.
The thing is, as much as I despise Trump, and RepubliKKKans generally, even more than Nixon, I would love to be able to give that assclown credit for two good things he did. That's legalizing marijuana and ending the damned DST foolishness.
The absolute worst part of DST is the stupid semiannual bitchfest on Slashdot.
Thanks to George Dabelyua Bush the DST changes in the USA and Europe are not out of sync and we get to enjoy this deep, meaningful and eye-opening discussion that has successfully changed the opinions and minds of millions not twice, but four times a year.
An EPIC implementation at a mid sided hospital is around a $50 million undertaking. For $50 million dollars a hospital they should be able to get the DST change right.
It's not like people's lives are at stake or anything... How Judith hasn't been sued to high Heaven over this I have no idea.
As a response to the various "stupid programmers" comments, I would like to point out that the systems in question (which I am intimately familiar with) do indeed record time as a second offset from an epoch (like with unixtime, but a different epoch), not as local time. The problem here is the standard for displaying time in a human-readable format. By the standard, 01:59:59 on 11/04/18 is followed by 01:00:00 on 11/04/18, so there is no unambiguous representation of two hours of time. Was something recorded at the first 01:30:00 of the day or the second? The system knows and can sort entries appropriately, but users can't read instant-level timestamps so they have to just be told it happened at the ambiguous 01:30:00. You would encounter the same problem if you were recording things on a piece of paper, it's just easier there to write "I mean the first one" in the margins there.
After having to deal with EPIC's junk EHR for a decade (not an MD I was on the "business IT" side of the health care providers), I'm only slightly shocked they can't handle having clocks set back. EPIC owns over 50% of the market and they pull in billions of dollars of revenue per quarter and they still can't get this right. Maybe they should spend less time building stupid fantasy land office buildings and do some actual programming work for a change.
Oh, and I hate DST, too...
There is a simple solution. Always keep time in gmt-0 and then change it on display. Change input to gmt. Then when you change the clock spring and fall, you’re changing just the offset, not event times. Nurses could wear watches set to gmt. Same for doctors. They can do the match for pulses, they can add or subtract for their time zone...
Lets revolt and not change our clocks!
that a system costing millions of dollars hasn't been fixed after all these years.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I wonder if the institutions using these systems have reported these problems to the FDA? From my experience working for a medical product software company it seems like this is an issue that the FDA should be looking into. Maybe not quite on the level of x-ray exposure time issues but certainly a software quality issue that should have been addressed within the context of data integrity. And yes medical information systems are within the purview of the FDA.
It's actually pretty disturbing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If you want to hit the morning feeding frenzy, you gotta beat the sun. If sunrise is 04:30 you need to be in the water and trolling an hour before. I'm up at 01:00 many times because packing the boat and truck, eating breakfast, and driving to the boat dock takes forever.
Also, you proved Darinbob's post above (you don't understand the implication of time and thought Aig's post was offtopic):
A: "Why are you in charge of the design?"
B: "Because I'm a medical records expert!"
A: "Do you understand time zones, DST, and all their implications?"
B: "It's just time, how hard can it be? I'm sure all the junior programmers working on it understand that stuff."