When the computers go down in a hospital, patient lives are put at risk. Medical records aren't accessible, care orders can't be entered or received, and the staff runs around trying to make things work as best they can, in spite of the unavailability of the hospital's mission-critical system.
Could anything be worse?
Yes.
The outages aren't tracked. They are hidden -- literally kept secret. After all, reputations are at stake here! If it ever got out that people whose salaries run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for running an operation that spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year can't even keep the computers running, who knows what might happen?
The IT Horror Show at Mount Sinai Hospital
I’ve already told the story of one of my personal experiences with horrible hospital software. Here’s another.
When I arrived at the cancer treatment center at Mount Sinai in New York last Fall, I immediately noticed that things were different than they had been on my prior visits. Patients were anxious, and staff were madly rushing about. Here's the waiting area on a calmer day.
The problem was immediately evident when I checked in: the screen was blank, and everything was being done on paper. This was Wednesday, and the computers had been down since early Monday. Some departments were back up, but since some important ones were still down, lots of things were still being done with phone calls and handwritten notes. Among other comments, I heard “This isn’t the first time this has happened.”
This multi-day outage didn’t take place in Podunk. It was at a premier medical center. Is it better at Mount Sinai than other places? Worse? I have no way of knowing.
This was outrageous. The health and life of patients, the hospital’s primary mission, was compromised, to put it mildly. Everyone was anxious and upset, but no one was shocked. Was anyone fired? Did the CIO lose his job? The CIO deserved to be frog-marched to the nearest exit, along with anyone else involved. But last I heard, the news of the outage was suppressed, as usual, and the CIO and his whole crew continue to be richly employed.
It appears to be a question of priorities. Hospitals and their CIO's issue press releases when they install a new version of the ridiculously expensive enterprise software they use, and move up another rung on the ladder of how heavily dependent your hospital is on its EMR (electronic medical record). Being more dependent on computers is considered to be a good thing in this industry! But simple things like tracking the up time of the system? Apparently it's beneath the level of the top people to pay attention to it -- it nonetheless appears to be important enough to train everyone to hide the outages.
Computer Availability
The more dependent you are on computers, the more important it is that they actually work! The top people in any computer-using organization can be cavalier about system up-time. This isn't just something that happens in healthcare, as I've pointed out. The two most important things about any computer system are that it works and that the performance is reasonable. This is true times a large number for a system that is mission critical for an organization devoted to curing sick people.
Conclusion
Heads should have rolled after the outage that I personally experienced and can personally testify actually happened at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Not only didn't they roll, they continue to crow about how wonderful they and their system are, while making sure to suppress all news and information about their IT malfeasance. To put it mildly: not acceptable.
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