> So while you can write down a prescription and cut a person open you can't manually do things pull up the patient's medical history for the last 10 years in a few seconds, have an image read remotely when there isn't a radiologist available on site, or electronically file for the meds to just show up instantly (all depending on what the outage issue is affecting of course).
I worked for a company that sold and managed medical radiology imaging systems. One of our customers' admins called and said "Hey, new scans aren't being properly processed so radiologists can't bring them up in the viewer". I told him I'd take a look at it right away.
A few minutes later, he called back; one of their ERs had a patient dying of a gunshot wound and the surgeon needed to get the xray up so he could see where the bullet was lodged before the guy bled out on the table.
Long outages are terrifying, but it only takes a few minutes for someone to die because people didn't have the information they needed to make the right calls.
Yep, when patients often still die while everything is working fine even a minor inconvenience like "all of the desktop icons reset by mistake" can be enough to tilt the needle the wrong way for someone.
I used to work for a company that provided network performance monitoring to hospitals. I am telling a Story second hand that I heard the CEO share.
One day, during a rapid pediatric patient intervention, a caregiver tried to log in to a PC to check a drug interaction. The computer took a long time to log in because of a VDI problem where someone had stored many images in a file that had to be copied on login. While the care team was waiting for the computer, an urgent decision was made to give the drug. But a drug interaction happened — one that would have been caught, had the VDI session initialized more quickly.
The patient died and the person whose VDI profile contained the images in the bad directory committed suicide. Two lives lost because files were in the wrong directory.
We can definitely get local imaging with X-Ray and ultrasound - we use bedside machines that can be used and interpreted quickly.
X-Ray has limitations though - most of our emergencies aren't as easy to diagnose as bullets or pneumonia. CT, CTA, and to a lesser extent MRI are really critical in the emergency department, and you definitely need four years of training to interpret them, and a computer to let you view the scan layer-by-layer. For many smaller hospitals they may not have radiology on-site and instead use a remote radiology service that handles multiple hospitals. It's hard to get doctors who want to live near or commute to more rural hospitals, so easier for a radiologist to remotely support several.
GP referred to "processed," which could mean a few things. I interpreted it to mean that the images were not recording correctly locally prior to any upload, and they needed assistance with that machine or the software on it.
I worked for a company that sold and managed medical radiology imaging systems. One of our customers' admins called and said "Hey, new scans aren't being properly processed so radiologists can't bring them up in the viewer". I told him I'd take a look at it right away.
A few minutes later, he called back; one of their ERs had a patient dying of a gunshot wound and the surgeon needed to get the xray up so he could see where the bullet was lodged before the guy bled out on the table.
Long outages are terrifying, but it only takes a few minutes for someone to die because people didn't have the information they needed to make the right calls.