Beware the Y2K bug
Disasters could lurk in your mainframe system
Ask your IS people how the millennium, or Y2K, bug may affect your job. A worst-case scenario would force your hospital back to hard-copy billing for Medicare. Robin Will, director of information management for Shands Hospital System in Gainesville, FL, states categorically, "The fix cannot not happen. If our system is not fixed, it would cost us dearly. It would affect our billing and clinical documentation, and bring us to a work stoppage."
Variously called the millennium bug or Y2K, the computer processing time bomb arises from the nearly universal practice over the past 30 or more years of using two digits rather than four to designate the calendar year, for example, DD/MM/YY. Many computer programs were written for a two-digit notation to save costly storage space and data-entry time.
Most programs will assume the year 2000 is 00. There is no two-digit designation for the 21st century. Subtracting 45 from 00 would yield -45, not 55. If your hospital had a patient who was 99 in 1999, a computer would calculate the patient’s age as 2 years old in 2002.
With the approach of Jan. 1, 2000, computers everywhere will begin getting confused over dates unless applications are fixed or replaced. Any calculation that involves a date billing, Medicare reimbursements, clinical documentation could yield incorrect answers.
The millennium bug appears in older mainframes running COBOL programs, as well as networks, minicomputers, and PCs. Hospitals could be affected, along with insurance companies, financial institutions, communications firms, and the federal government. Anyone who uses an ordinary spreadsheet on a desktop computer is also vulnerable. The millennium bug may not faze your personal computer. Will notes her hospital’s MIS system is 24 years old. Some hospitals’ information systems go back as far as 40 years. (See related story on how to check out your PC’s response to Y2K, above.)
The problem must be addressed now, experts agree. Check the documentation of your non- custom-designed software, to see if it is year-2000 compliant. If it’s not, or if you can’t determine that, contact the manufacturer. Microsoft, for example, is working on a solution now for its products. If your software is custom-designed, contact your vendor and ask what the solution is. If your own information systems department built the system, they should already be developing a plan. (For more information on the Y2K bug, go to http://www.year2000.com on the Internet.)
The federal government is dealing with Y2K now. The U.S. Navy has even designated a Year 2000 action officer. A recent report from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget predicts computer programs will fail in one of three ways: They’ll reject legitimate entries, they’ll compute erroneous results, or they simply won’t run.1
Federal agencies estimate they will spend $2.3 billion between now and fiscal year 2000 fixing the bug. A worldwide cost estimate provided to Congress last year puts the figure at between $300 and $400 billion to remedy the problem. No one has yet estimated the cost of not fixing the problem.
Reference
1. U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Getting Federal Computers Ready for 2000. Washington, DC; Feb. 6, 1997.
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