Glad you're ok. Was just stunned that the system at the hospital was so fragile that there was no delivery of medical care possible when it failed.
I'm having trouble believing that there was a 100% lack of redundancy! confused
They could have had a building full of flat-liners and not known for hours. crazy
I have reason to believe they did have physical redundancy. The problem resulted from the hospital's use of a very sophisticated integrated patient management system that ties everything together. As with any properly designed database system any given piece of information occurs once and only once in the entire system. So if, for example, the patient database subsystem crashes the patients cease to exist in the system so medication cannot be ordered or approved for non-existent patients, heart monitors would know someone somewhere in the hospital was in trouble, but who and where would be a mystery so the staff would have had to sprint from room to room to locate the patient in trouble. The biggest problem in this case was the inability to provide or administer the proper medications. The efforts to prevent incorrect patient medication (an all too frequent problem in hospitals) created a huge problem in this case.
I suspect the failure in this case was the result of a failed upgrade and it was deemed moore expedient to back out the change rather than bring a parallel system on line. It would probably be possible to mitigate the risk through system design changes, but the cost would be enormous and not justifiable on a cost/benefit analysis.
