August 30, 1999

State officials postpone Y2K report on 108 `critical concern' hospitals

Gary Shepherd

Special To The Business Journal

One hundred and eight hospitals, including some of the largest in Florida, didn't pass muster in the first round of Y2K readiness reporting.

They were declared to be of "critical concern" by state officials.

Hospital executives were notified in late July by Team Florida 2000, the state's Y2K compliance team.

Hospital information system managers scrambled in recent weeks to prove they will beat the Y2K bug, and many reported major steps forward. Nevertheless, a Team Florida 2000 hospital report has not been made public yet. It may be released next week.

The report will come out "as soon as we are satisfied that all hospitals have been given ample opportunity to update their status," said Scott McPherson, executive director of Team Florida 2000.

"We have many letters on file from the hospitals who believe they received the [critical concern] designation in error," McPherson said.

The 108 hospitals were in a "draft ... internal working designation" based on surveys of 281 hospitals, he said.

"What jumped out at us was the need [for] many of these hospitals to re-report their status in advance of the release of this data to the media," McPherson wrote in an e-mail.

He said the automated process discriminated "against larger institutions such as Orlando Regional Health Care, Miami's Jackson Memorial and Morton Plant Hospital."

Those facilities and others responded quickly and were removed from critical concern status, McPherson said. Exactly how many remain bad-listed by the state is unclear.

The publication delay was cheered by the Florida Hospital Association, which urged individual CEOs to move fast to ease a potential PR nightmare.

"A lot of hospitals are 98 percent compliant on patient care devices, because those are the things they attacked first to ensure patient safety," said Carlos Olivardia, FHA vice president of computer information. "Now, most of them are working on accounting systems and things like that, which are critical for business continuity."

The FHA urges state officials to issue the report in two parts: patient care and administration Y2K concerns.

The Team Florida 2000 report, when released, will be posted on the Internet, at http://www.tf2k.org. The group is plans an Aug. 30 press conference and release of a government-entities Y2K report and could release the hospital report then.

Hollywood Medical Center, Hialeah Hospital and Miami Children's Hospital were among 34 South Florida facilities of critical concern. Hospitals listed:

Would not be 100 percent Y2K ready until the fourth quarter of 1999.

Were not at least 70 percent ready by April 1.

Required outside resources to finish getting Y2K ready.

Had no "business continuation plans" should the Y2K problem disrupt operation.

The Y2K problem began years ago when programmers wrote code that recognized only the last two digits of the year. So, 1999 was coded as "99." Systems not Y2K compliant may mistake 2000 as 1900.

One measure of hospitals was of "mission critical systems." That means, McPherson said, "something that the hospital absolutely has to have for the well-being of patients or for the operations of the hospital."

For instance, many crucial medical devices are operated by microprocessors.

As of July 8 reporting, Aventura Hospital & Medical Center, for example, had 0 percent of four total "mission critical systems" complete. By July 30 when it re-reported data, Aventura increased its number of critical systems to 76 systems and noted that it was 92 percent ready.

Big Y2K spenders are led by Holy Cross Hospital ($8 million) and 11 other hospitals citing expenses of $6.25 million.

Gary Shepherd writes for our sister publication, the Tampa Business Journal. Staff Writer Lucy Chabot and Susan Lundine, of the Orlando Business Journal, contributed to this report.

http://www.amcity.com/southflorida/stories/1999/08/30/story4.html?h=y2k

-- Gayla (privacy@please.com), August 30, 1999