One provider’s Y2K journey
Draw a map and then follow it
Before embarking on the road to the new millennium, make sure you have a good map, suggests Greg Solecki, vice president of home health care for Henry Ford Health System Home Health. He developed a chart that started at the end, where he wants to be on Jan. 1, 2000, and worked backward to see which tasks had to be done and when.
The first step was to ask his operational managers to inventory anything they thought might be vulnerable to year 2000 (Y2K) glitches. He added those elements to a list the health system had provided. The managers then had to determine which pieces of listed equipment were compliant and which were not. "That inventory took months," Solecki says. "I really had to push people to provide it."
Henry Ford diagnosed its software and hardware using off-the-shelf programs that are available for as little as $50. These programs run on your computer system to determine whether you have a Y2K-compliant program. Other machinery and equipment were more difficult to diagnose, requiring letters and calls to vendors and manufacturers.
"One thing you have to do is determine if you want to be conservative or liberal in how your prioritize your needs," Solecki advises. "The fax machine not having the right date may seem small, but to us, a fax of a physician order without a date is a big deal. We need that date to show compliance."
The phone system not having correct dates on the voice mail isn’t as critical, he adds. "You just have to change your greeting to ask for the date and time the person called."
The next step is the hardest, he says. "We have to wait to see whether our vendors are compliant." Letters have been sent out to them, and many have assured Henry Ford verbally that Y2K is not an issue for the product or service they supply. "Now we have to wait for written confirmation. But that doesn’t mean we’ll get it in our time frame. If we don’t, do we get a new system? We have to balance the scrapping and moving-forward costs. The window is closing. If we don’t get into it, we’re already probably too late." (For additional information on checking for vendor compliance and assessing potential Y2K problems, see p. 6.)
As he waits, Solecki is developing contingency plans for Henry Ford Home Health. "We assume we will go down on Jan. 1, 2000, and figure out how we will work," he says. Some of the plans are easy: If the fax machine doesn’t put a date on top of the fax, a manual date stamp can be used. Software will be backed up before midnight on Dec. 31, 1999.
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