[Discuss] How Daylight Saving Time Messes With Hospitals

[Rich Pieri]

Lots of articles about this over the weekend, and they all quote the
same line about how handling a time change is simple and easy.

Fact is, it's anything but simple or easy when it comes to medical
records. Here's an example: what time were you born? If your birthday
for a given year falls between the second Sunday of March and the first
Sunday of April or between the last Sunday of October and the first
Sunday of November then you're probably wrong because the days for
daylight savings changed in 2007. Your times are off by about 1 hour
unless you accomodate that change or your place of birth and your
current location do not honor daylight savings time.

Multiply that by many hundreds of millions of patient records across
many years of patients' lives, many locales and time zones and
timekeeping changes, and inconsistencies across different
record-keeping procedures, and you have a bonafide nightmare.

Is there a solution? I don't think so short of doing away with daylight
savings. Epic have been at this for almost 40 years. If it were
possible and viable I think they'd have figured it out by now.

-- 
Rich Pieri