Watch out for these potential glitches
Watch out for these potential glitches
Avoid the 1999 rush; act now
Is the so-called "millennium bug" a major disaster awaiting your hospital, or is it, as one admitting official noted, mostly media hype?
The probable answer is that it’s hype for hospitals that are prepared, and potential disaster for those that aren’t. There will be more attention paid to the topic as the calendar keeps flipping toward the millennium, says Michael G. Eckstein, president and CEO of PSIMED, a health information consulting company in Santa Ana, CA.
"The first people who started thinking about this were the financial people — banks and insurance companies — because they have the most to lose. Then the word started to spread; then you saw others start looking at it, like retail and transportation. Now, soon we’ll see the health care industry starting to talk about it."
While the rest of the industry catches up, here are some tips the experts have for you:
• Be aggressive with vendors.
If you have a working agreement with a system vendor, contact them immediately to get their assessment of any problems, and find out how they plan to deal with them.
But be aware that, "Occasionally you’ll come across a vendor who is biased," says Bob Dimmitt, a medical applications consultant with Networked Medical Systems, a health information consulting company in Houston. "They may not want to admit they haven’t addressed the problem. They’ll say, No, we don’t have a problem, we’re addressing that.’ If you go to an independent consultant they’ll be able to tell where you’re system is, what the various software packages can do, and research the vendors to get the real story."
Don’t assume anything
Some software vendors may be able to solve problems with a simple upgrade to a new version that recognizes the 2000 date, or add what are called "patches" to temporarily fix the problem. "But if you’re talking about a major code rewrite, you have to build a major fire under you’re vendors," says Eckstein. "If you’re beholden to everybody who’s a vendor and you don’t have access to the codes yourself, you’re pretty helpless. This could take over a year, and that’s being conservative." Also keep in mind that the larger vendors will likely concentrate on their larger customers, he adds.
Make your contacts with vendors formal, says Peter de Jager, of Brantton, Ontario, Canada, a speaker and consultant who has spent the past three years shouting warnings to industries around the world. He advises you to send a registered letter to your vendors asking whether your systems are year 2000 compliant. If they don’t respond, seek legal counsel, he says.
He also warns you to carefully investigate any technology companies you’re not familiar with. There are reports that some companies have decided that rather than fixing the millennium problems, it would be less expensive simply to go out of business in a couple of years, then reconstitute into a new company after the crisis has passed, he says.
• Don’t assume new information systems are year 2000 compliant.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson is installing a new $12.2 million systemwide computer network that is not year 2000 compliant, says Cheryl Berthelsen, PhD, RRA, an associate professor of health information management. The vendor has given repeated assurances that it already has the "patches" ready to make the system compliant, but the lesson, Berthelsen says, is don’t assume anything.
• Budget appropriately.
You’ll have to determine your own costs for inspecting and recoding your computer systems, but if you call in experts to do it, it won’t be cheap. The standard measure of cost is calculated on a per-line-of-code basis. Initially many estimates for this were in the range of 30 to 40 cents per line, but the cost is rising steadily and now stands at about $1.50 per line of code, says Barbara Goodman, millennium team project leader for the Health Care Financing Administration. That includes conducting the shakedown tests necessary to make sure the changes work.
• Watch for a scaleback in development of new technology.
De Jager agrees with the predictions of some experts that by the year 1999 one of every two computer programmers in the country will be working to make existing systems year 2000 compliant. Avoid the rush and attack your problems soon, he says.
This shifting of programmers to fix year 2000 problems also will mean a slowdown in other technological advancements, such as development of the new JAVA computer language, he says.
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