New year brings Y2K harbingers, four personal IT resolutions
By ARTHUR GASCH
Healthcare InfoTech Contributing Editor
Welcome to the new year, which brought with it the first vestiges of Y2K. Only two days into 1999, the FDA reported that recording devices embedded in Hewlett-Packard (Andover, MA) and Invivo Research (Orlando, FL) medical devices were not updating to 1999 correctly, and that such early harbingers of Y2K may be more widespread. These don’t particularly hurt anything (or anyone), but they generate inaccurate and confusing documentation.
In terms of New Year’s IT resolutions, we have a few. The first is not to implement Windows NT 2000, at least not on any mission-critical applications assuming Microsoft can even give us the product in 1999. NT 2000 had zero chance of being bug-free, and with 37 million new lines of code, it is a sure bet that 6 to 12 months will be the minimum time after initial release before the more critical bugs are identified and fixed with Service Packs.
Our second resolution is to obtain one of the newer 500 MHz or 600 MHz CPUs which will be introduced by all three chip manufacturers Intel, AMD and Cyrix in 1999, and test them with current applications. We may even look into the new Rambus for PCs, allowing peripherals to run at bus speeds of up to 400 MHz, but only if we can find some peripherals which implement this high-speed wonder. It is hard to imagine the processing power of 600 MHz PCs with 400 MHz data buses to peripherals. One might even be able to run Windows 2000 on these at the same speed that Windows NT 4 runs on more mundane platforms.
We have used CPUs with all three chips in our company, and found no problems with any except the Cyrix. The Cyrix chip seems to be power supply (voltage) sensitive. We have a Cyrix 6X86 series chip in one workstation which would serve up NT crashes about every two days. After ruling out other causes, we turned to the CPU chip. In checking service notes on Cyrix chips to determine the proper voltage at which to operate, we came up with two or three different values, depending upon the serial number of the chips not good! Adjusting the voltage up a notch to the CPU instantly doubled the interval between failures, and replacing one bank of memory chips (which tested good on every memory tester) resolved the problem altogether, finally making this troublesome workstation reliable.
This experience suggests an important lesson for all medical software vendors. If you want your systems to run reliably, and not to be blamed when they crash unexpectedly, or burdened with supporting angry healthcare users who call you when they do, you had better take a close look at the hardware on which your applications are running. While no software vendors make much on hardware, and most won’t even sell it to the medical user, it is a fact that not all hardware combinations are compatible and faulty hardware or CPUs make for unhappy customers. Perhaps software vendors should recommend a standardized hardware platform supplier, one with a system designed and tested for healthcare applications. Better yet, before they recommend anything, they should test the competing platforms on the market. The biggest suppliers of such platforms include Tremont Medical (Aston, PA), Planar Systems (Beaverton, OR), and Datavue. All of these have customized hardware platforms intended for medical applications. Of these, Tremont offers the most open architecture, able to accommodate standard form factor Pentium CPU boards.
Getting healthcare providers to adopt the notion that they should implement an enterprise-wide hardware platform, just as they do software applications, is good for everybody, as it both minimizes hardware-related problems and facilitates troubleshooting, if they do develop. It was interesting to see Tremont carts shown in the Siemens and other booths at last month’s HIT conference in Boston, running a variety of software applications. It will be interesting to see who is running their applications on which platforms at HIMSS (Healthcare Infor mation and Management Systems Society) in February, a much bigger show and a much better landscape from which to infer vendor preference. Bottom line, software vendors should at least make hardware recommendations to medical end-users, and perhaps include clauses in their warranty statements related to running their applications on "non-qualified" PC hardware.
Our third New Year’s resolution is to get acquainted with Java. With the injunction issued by the courts and the requirement for Microsoft to comply with the Sun licensing agreement before the trial proceeds (by the end of February), plus the introduction of Jini and release 2 of Java, it looks like Java is going to become a viable platform for browser-based medical applications. There are even two different groups one led by Hewlett-Packard (An dover, MA), notorious for system standardization initiatives to develop a real-time variant of Java. So, Java is a platform to become more familiar with in 1999. Its portability will help those medical suppliers writing for Unix platforms, and coupled with Jini’s interoperability with Windows networks, breathe more life into Unix for healthcare.
Fourth, we will take a look in this year at the 3Com Palm Pilot, now in version VII, to see if its handwriting recognition, which to date has been akin to the original Apple Newton’s peculiar approach, has gotten to the point where mere mortals like ourselves, without hours of learning how to write characters in ways that the primitive recognition algorithms can understand, can actually use it out of the box. Newton got to excellent handwriting recognition three years ago in only its second version. Why is it that three years later the handwriting recognition of the most popular handheld on the market still is deficient? Perhaps 3Com will or has fixed it in the new Palm Pilot VII. The added wireless capability of this model makes it very attractive, and provides some low-end fit into healthcare applications, particularly if the display can be programmed to do waveforms. If so, it might be an interesting device for MDs and RNs to carry around to monitor telemetry patients in hospitals, instead of the pagers now in use.
Happy New Year to Healthcare InfoTech readers. See you at the spring conferences (see story on page 3). Plan to go this year, as next year the planes, trains, elevators and perhaps even automobiles may all be uncooperative in getting you there, depending on what develops with Y2K.
Speaking of Y2K, here’s a tongue-in-cheek news flash: Microsoft announced today that the release date for the Windows 2000 operating system has been delayed until the 2nd quarter of 1901.
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