http://www.govhealthit.com/article96828-11-14-06-Web&ghitnewsletter=yes

Yep, let's let the Feds design the systems to manage electronic health
records... after all, they selected the system for managing the case records
at the FBI, right?  http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/35250-1.html   Y'all
might recall this one...(Despite the expenditure of $104 million, the
program is widely considered a failure that the FBI has all but shut down)

Comments from the article above on the Military Records System losses...

"...lost records of almost 5,000 patient encounters because of hardware and
software problems..."

"A database flag or trigger was incorrectly set ...Consequently, clinical
encounters between doctors and patients were not captured and stored because
the system viewed each as an inactive patient..."

"...September resulted in the loss of information from 1,400 clinical
encounters...because of a hardware failure in a Redundant Array of
Independent Disks when a ... technician installed a new piece of equipment
and inadvertently erased all the data on the disk by setting it to factor
default,... No backup was in place..."


I dunno Steve... Paper is sounding pretty good as a backup, if nothing else
=)

In all seriousness though, these systems should be better managed and AT
MINIMUM should be designed to "fail safe"... if there's no tape in place,
the backup routine flags this and runs at a later date... if these are
critical systems and the sole source of this data, a RAID should be setup to
ensure nothing is erased until it's capture is VERIFIED and VALIDATED.

Sorry, I must be sounding like one of those ridiculous RMs that UNDERSTANDS
technology and didn't wait for ARMA or someone else to give me the knowledge
that I knew I would need to survive in this profession... let me go back
into the basement with my musty, but comfortable smelling, paper again. =)

Larry

-- 
Larry Medina
Danville, CA
RIM Professional since 1972

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