A relative of mine had back surgery late yesterday. Today the hospital nursing staff couldn’t proceed with the pain medication process for patients recovering from surgery because they didn’t have access to the hospital systems.

My wife is a nurse. She has a non-critical job making care plans for patients and the system is STILL down.

Hope she's okay. For better or worse, our entire emergency department flow is orchestrated around epic. If we can't even see the board, nurses don't know what orders to perform, etc.

If it’s so critical that nurses are left standing around clueless then if it goes down entire teams of people should be going to prison for manslaughter.

Or, we could build robust systems that can tolerate indefinite down time. Might cost more, might need more staff.

Pick one. I’ll always pick the one that saves human lives when systems go down.

Okay but that will affect hospital profits and our PE firms bought these hospitals specifically to wrench all redundancy out of these systems in the name of efficiency (higher margins and thus profit) so that just won't do.

Private equity people need to start getting multiple life sentences for fucking around with shit like this. It's unironically a national security issue.

1. Hospitals should not make profits.

2. Hospitals should not have executives.

3. Hospitals should be community funded with backstop by the federal government.

4. PE is a cancer - let the doctors treat it.

Doctors can't even own hospitals now. Doctor-owned hospitals were banned with the passage of Obamacare in order to placate big hospital systems concerned about the growing competition.

Another way to look at it is that you can have more hospitals using systems with a lower cost, thus saving more lifes comparing to only a few hospitals using an expensive system.

I wish your mother recovers promptly. And I’m glad she doesn’t run on Windows. ;-)

Ha ha! Good one! This is a save!

Wishes for a speedy recovery to your mom!

I hope no one uses such single point of failure systems anymore. Especially CS. The same is applicable for Cloudflare as well! But at least, the systems will be functioning standalone and accessible in their case and could cause only netwide outage! (i.e., if the CF infra goes down!)

Anyways, who knows what is going to happen with such widespread vendor dependency?

The world gets reminded about the Supply Chain Attacks every year which is a good (but a scary) one that definitely needs some deep thinking...

Up for it?

I am "saving" this comment :)

... and seconding all the best wishes for the mother involved. Do get well.-

I hope she's ok.

Wishing you and your mom the best

I wish your mother the best <3

Thank you <3

Idk… critical hospital systems should be air gapped.

All of the critical equipment is. But we need internet access on computers, or at the very least Epic does to pull records from other hospitals.

> We were discharged at midnight by the doctor, the nurse didn't come into our exam room to tell us until 4am. I can't imagine the mess this has caused.

That's an extra 4 hours of emergency room fees you ideally wouldn't have to pay for.

Having a medical system that has the concept of "hours of emergency room fees" is also a pretty fundamental problem

It's actually per 15 minutes :)

Honestly, that sounds like a typical ER visit.