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.
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+
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).
WTF?
BTW, DST sucks just as bad in Europe.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
And every year we have the vociferous few who will defend their supposed god given right to force everyone into being a nation of clock fiddlers.
Sadly, almost every year about a couple of weeks before DST ends there is some news story about kids being killed walking to school in the dark - because the car driver could not see them on the dark road.
I am quite sure that there are hundreds of people who have died as a result of supposed daylight savings time. This story mentions just one of the problems that could lead to delays with acessing much needed medical records in a timely manner.
Imagine if there would need to be an airline full of people that would be rammed into the ground when the law was written so we all could be forced to fiddle with our clocks. Do you think that the law instituting it would pass then?? Because we've probably lost more lives than that to the ignoble DST since it was passed back in the '70s. It's time to stop listening to the loudmouths and stop
having to put up with their forced stupidity.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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.
It is more complicated than it seems. In the EU, northern countries (who seem to be the ones who actually care) want DST to be always off, while southern countries want it to be always on. So after the switch we might end up with "horizontal timezones" where previously we had no timezone difference at all, and this way incompetent programmers who store dates as strings will cause damage all year round instead of twice a year. In the US it might not be much of a problem because people are already used to different timezones.
*or* they could just change when school starts.
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's why when coding I always use things like the Unix timestamp or something similar and use a 64 bit integer to be safe. A resolution of milliseconds is usually good enough for the majority of systems.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.