In the New Yorker, Atul Gawande reports that the $1.6 billion Epic electronic medical records system at Harvard Medical School-affiliated Partners Health Care (Mass General, Brigham and Women's, etc.) can't handle a simple change of the clocks:
Last fall, the night before daylight-saving time ended, an all-user e-mail alert went out. The system did not have a way to record information when the hour from 1 A.M. to 1:59 A.M. repeated in the night. This was, for the system, a surprise event. The only solution was to shut down the lab systems during the repeated hour. Data from integrated biomedical devices (such as monitoring equipment for patients' vital signs) would be unavailable and would have to be recorded by hand. Fetal monitors in the obstetrics unit would have to be manually switched off and on at the top of the repeated hour.
The electronic medical records were pitched originally to save money, in part by reducing the need for filing clerks to deal with paper records. But as Gawande also reports, they now in some cases require "scribes," employees who help doctors by operating the computer programs for them. "Scribes aren't a perfect solution. Underpaid and minimally trained, they learn mostly on the go, and turn over rapidly (most within months). Research has found error rates between twenty-four and fifty per cent in recording key data."
