Watch out for these potential glitches
If the potential computer problems awaiting your health system as the year 2000 approaches are so menacing, why weren’t the warnings sounded years ago? Experts tell Hospital Payment & Information Management that they’re also perplexed by this.
Outside of technological circles, "You’re not hearing a lot of talk about this," says Bob Dimmitt, medical applications consultant with Networked Financial Systems, a health information consulting company in Houston. "It’s going up in meetings occasionally. Just yesterday it came up at a meeting I attended, but as an aside, not a direct question. . . . People are talking about it, but it’s peripheral talk. If I’m at a client’s site, they usually don’t even ask about it. It’s not in the general media yet."
There will be more attention as the calendar keeps flipping toward the millennium, says Michael G. Eckstein, president and CEO of PSIMED, a health information consulting company in Santa Anna, 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.
And make those contacts formal, says Peter de Jager, a speaker and consultant in Brantton, Ontario, Canada, 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 be careful in dealings with all technology companies. Some already have decided that rather than fixing the millennium problems, it will 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 HIM. 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.
• Prepare for the leap year conundrum.
Once you’re convinced your systems will handle data for Jan. 1, 2000, try them for Feb. 29, 2000, says Berthelsen. "I’ve found several places on the [world wide] web where people have found boogers even in the hardware ROM of date generators. That problem is that the algorithm used in the ROM doesn’t calculate that the year 2000 is a leap year. So you might do just fine when the year 2000 starts, but wait until February 29. You might think you’re in the clear, then suddenly, kaboom."
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