[Discuss] How Daylight Saving Time Messes With Hospitals

[Mike Small]

Rich Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

If database programmers would only always use UTC for their storage
format and translate as necessary for presentation it wouldn't be so
bad, but I guess in your example case it's too late now.

Maybe you'd like this article if you haven't seen it already:
http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html

-- 
Mike Small
smallm at sdf.org