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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.
All the same problems happen if you change timezones when you move.
Um, no. When you move, you're in a different place. I know that's a challenging notion for someone who lives in Mom's basement, but please do try.
When we we go off DST here, you go from sunset at 5PM one day to sunset at 4PM the next. It is quite unsettling.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
And as a result it gets light at 430am in the summer. You're not even up at 6am and it is full daylight outside.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It's not an update problem. I help maintain the computers and software for several doctors. HIPAA required all hospitals and private practices to switch to electronic medical records by 2013. That deadline and more recent requirements being phased in (ICD-10 - standardized codes for reasons for a medical visit - was required a couple years back) means all medical software is relatively new or updated recently. Any doctor using software more than about 2 years old (for ICD-10) is operating illegally.
The fact that the programmers writing this software are using local time instead of UTC is sheer ignorance, laziness, or incompetence. Another scenario I can think of where local time is a problem is if a patient visits their doctor on the east coast, then immediately flies to the west coast and is hospitalized. The west coast hospital will request the electronic records from the doctor on the east coast. Because it takes some time for the doctor's staff to enter and finalize the data from the patient's visit, due to the different time zones some of the data the west coast hospital receives will be timestamped in the future if the software uses local time.
DST changes are just a headache, but when you run a computer system then you shall always make sure that timestamps are stored in a "neutral" way by using UTC. What's presented to the user is just a presentation issue in the UI.
That is more or less a given. The problem is dealing with user input.
If you are going to record when something was entered then that is fine, there is no reason for the user to input it.
The complicated part is when you want to input that something happened or should happen at a time that occurs twice.
Was it during the first or second time that those times occurred?
Also, the presentation isn't "just a presentation issue".
"Doctor said we should administer medication every other hour" means that it is necessary to be able to indicate which of the two same hours it was last administered on.
The problem is easy to solve, but if it is solved differently in every system then every new person will misunderstand it and get it wrong.
If we are going to keep DST it isn't sufficient to have a standard for how to write those time. The standard also has to be well known.
Computers are just a red herring in this case, you need to solve it on a pen and paper based system first.
Updating the GUI is done in 10 minutes after that unless you have to redesign the entire thing to make room.