> I suggested a simple solution for that - receipt printers.

Just so I understand what you are saying you are proposing that we drown our hospital rooms in paper receipt constantly. In the off chance the computers go down very rarely?

Do you see any possible drawbacks with your proposed solution?

> possibly criminally negligent to make a life critical process dependent on the availability of a distributed IT application

What process is not “life critical” in a hospital? Do you suggest that we don’t use IT at all?

Modern medicine requires computers. You literally cannot provide medical care in a critical care setting with the sophistication and speed required for modern critical care without electronic medical records. Fall back to paper? Ok, but you fall back to 1960s medicine, too.

We need computers. But, how about we fall back to an air-gapped computer with no internet connection and a battery backup?

Why does everything need the internet?

> Why does everything need the internet?

Why would you ever need to move a patient from one hospital room containing one set of airgapped computers into another, containing another set of airgapped computers?

Why would you ever need to get information about a patient (a chart, a prescription, a scan, a bill, an X-Ray) to a person who is not physically present in the same room (or in the same building) as the patient?

You wouldn't airgap individual rooms.

And sending data out can be done quite securely. Then replies could be highly sanitized or kept on specific machines outside the air gap.

You also need to receive similar data from outside the hospital.

And now you've added an army of people running around moving USB sticks, or worse, printouts and feeding them into other computers.

It's madness, and nobody wants to do it.

Local area networks air gapped from the internet don't need to be air gapped from each other. You could have nodes in each network responsible for transmitting specific data to the other networks.. like, all the healthcare data you need. All other traffic, including windows updates? Blocked. Using IP still a risk? Use something else. As long as you can get bytes across a wire, you can still share data over long distances.

In my eyes, there is a technical solution therr that keeps friction low for hospital staff: network stuff, on an internet, but not The Internet...

Edit: I've since been reading the other many many comment threads on this HN post which show the reasons why so much stuff in healthcare is connected to each other via good old internet, and I can see there's way more nuance and technicality I am not privy to which makes "just connect LANs together!" less useful. I wasn't appreciating just how much of medicine is telemedicine.

I think wiring computers within the hospital over LAN, and adding a human to the loop for inter-hospital communication seems like a reasonable compromise.

Yes there will be some pain, but the alternative is what we have right now.

> nobody wants to do it.

Tough luck. There's lots of things I don't want to do.

Less time urgent, and would not take an army.

This approach is also what popped in my head. I've seen people use white boards for this already so it must be ok from a hipaa standpoint.

A hospital my wife worked at over a decade ago didn't use EMR's, it was all on paper. Each patient had a binder. Per stay. And for many of them it rolled into another binder. (This was neuro-ICU so generally lengthy patient stays with lots of activity, but not super-unusual or Dr House stuff, every major city in America will have 2-3 different hospitals with that level of care.)

But they switched over to EMR because the advantages of Pyxis[1] in getting the right medications to the right patients at the right time- and documenting all of that- are so large that for patient safety reasons alone it wins out over paper. You can fall back to paper, it's just a giant pain in the ass to do it, and then you have to do the data entry to get it all back into EMR's. Like my wife, who was working last night when everyone else in her department got Crowdstrike'd, she created a document to track what she did so it could be transferred into EMR's once everything comes back up. And the document was over 70 pages long! Just for one employee for one shift.

1: Workflow: Doctor writes prescription in EMR. Pharmacist reviews charts in EMR, approves prescription. Nurse comes to Pyxis cabinet and scans patient barcode. Correct drawer opens in cabinet so the proper medication- and only the proper medication- is immediately available to nurse (technicians restock cabinet when necessary). Nurse takes medication to patient's room, scans patient barcode and medication barcode, administers drug. This system has dramatically lowered the rates of wrong-drug administration, because the computers are watching over things and catch humans getting confused on whether this medication is supposed to go to room 12 or room 21 in hour 11 of their shift. It is a great thing that has made hospitals safer. But it requires a huge amount of computers and networks to support.

> Pyxis cabinet

Why would a Pyxis cabinet run Windows? I realize Windows isn't even necessarily at fault here, but why on earth would such a device run Windows? Is the 90s form of mass incompetence in the industry still a thing where lots of stuff is written for Windows for no reason?

I don't know what Pyxis runs on, my wife is the pharmacist and she doesn't recognize UI package differences with the same practiced eye that I do. And she didn't mention problems with the Pyxis. Just problems with some of their servers and lots of end user machines. So I don't know that they do.

You only need one link in the chain of doctor -> pharmacist -> pixys -> nurse to be reliant on Windows for this to fail.

This would be a disaster from a HIPAA perspective, and an unimaginable amount of paperwork.