(Computerworld 08/24/98)

 

 Health care industry shares contingency plans

Stewart Deck

  

With the countdown to 2000 now less than 500 days and hospital CIOs still looking to quickly pull together their contingency plans, a Tennessee-based consultancy is compiling the results of an ongoing survey of health care technology experiences and plans.

 

 

Interdependence is "critical in health care," said Daniel Nutkis, president of Odin Group LLC, the Nashville research consultancy undertaking the survey, "and people now seem to want to talk to their peers and share war stories." Odin Group will make the survey results available free after publishing them in November, Nutkis said.

 

 

The group's survey comes as chief information officers in the health care industry recently called for widespread sharing of year 2000-readiness data about computerized medical equipment, from intravenous infusion pumps to life-support equipment [CW, Aug. 17]. Nutkis said 1,600 health care information systems professionals at hospitals, equipment makers and drug companies have expressed interest in sharing year 2000 compliance information.

 

 

In the past, health care outfits have been reluctant to share such contingency plans, but that's beginning to change. "People in health care have been afraid of the liability questions and haven't shared their [year 2000] status or strategies," said Larry Grandia, CIO at Intermountain Health Care in Salt Lake City. But, Grandia added, that reticence is fading.

 

 

Will Weider's mission these days is to discover which of the thousands of pieces of medical equipment in his hospitals need a year 2000 adjustment. "The year 2000 is my life right now," said Weider, vice president and CIO at Trinity Regional Health System in Rock Island, Ill.

 

 

And Weider has to know the extent of his equipment replacement costs within the next six weeks so he can budget for them. One potential upside: Trinity doesn't develop any technology in-house and will press its equipment suppliers for year 2000 status updates.

 

 

Even so, Weider estimates that as much as a third of his annual $1.5 million budget next year may be spent fixing, updating and buying equipment to replace noncompliant systems. Like Weider, many health care CIOs are also putting together year 2000 contingency action plans for dealing with machines and systems that can't be updated by Jan. 1, 2000, observers said.

 

 

Stephanie Moore, an analyst at Giga Information Group in Norwalk, Conn., said that even at this late date people can learn plenty from sharing their experiences. "Given how far behind the heath care industry is, [IS] people shouldn't be trying to re-invent the wheel."

 

 

Other health care year 2000 efforts have sprung up recently from the RX2000 Solutions Institute in Minneapolis and VHA, Inc. in Irving, Texas. Each of those databases compiles user data about vendors and equipment and makes the data available to subscribers.

 

 

Both have caught Weider's interest, but he said that the cost to subscribe can be prohibitive and that the nature of the data can't always be assured because the data is submitted anonymously.

 

 

Even with proper code clean-ups and testing, health care firms can't rest easy. "We have hundreds of trading partners that we have to make sure are compliant, too," said Donald Morchower, CIO at Highmark Blue Cross/Blue Shield in Pittsburgh. "Seeing what other people are planning to do in case something fails would be very beneficial."