Remember the Y2k "bug"? A while back, a reader asked about the potential impact when daylight-savings time starts earlier than usual
in the US come 2007. I remember the stories about the pending
legislation, but haven't really heard anything about it from vendors or
anyone else. Of course, any medical device that generates data for a
clinical record, either via printing or into a computerized record will
have to be patched. Much like the Y2k situation, vendors will provide
current products with upgrades and older products will have to be
replaced.

Hopefully I am not being a "chicken little" but I have drawn attention
within our IT shop to this issue (finally). It took about 3
conversations with our CTO and subsequent discussions with the VP of
Applications and our Director of Departmental Applications where I
showed them the notifications from Microsoft on the subject.
Finally, we have a project chartered for 2006 but no targeted funds for
remediations. Those that are at-risk (NT4 Server-based) are the
usual one-off, "well-architected", vendor "dream" solutions that are
prevalent in healthcare.

Well aren't all device vendor's systems "well-architected, dream
solutions?" The rub for this reader is their plans to implement an EMR
and automatically capture data from medical devices - a messy (and
potentially expensive) proposition in the best of circumstances. The
upside is that pending changes to daylight-savings may provide an
incentive to start planning EMR/medical device integration far enough
in advance to actually budget for upgrades, replacements and
integration systems.