As one of the Y2K army of programmers, I can assure you there would have been major outages and errors…
Monday Morning Update 12/30/24
Top News
HHS OCR issues a proposed update to the HIPAA security rule, which hasn’t been changed since 2013, to modernize the required cybersecurity practices of covered entities and their business associates.
Reader Comments
From Opus Two: “Re: VA salary cuts. A friend who is a VISN executive is about to finish reclassification of 4,000 lower-level, non-clinical jobs, which will result in sharp pay cuts. The reclassification was recommended in 2012, but the VA was able to avoid cuts by arguing that the jobs are critical. The VA also plans to reduce its workforce by 10,000 FTEs, primarily within medical facilities, during FY2025.” The American Federal of Government Employees union is pressing the VA to stop considering all position downgrades, arguing that they will hurt hiring and retention. Like all federal agencies, the VA claims that that it is understaffed (at 471,000 employees) and disputes the characterization that it never fires underperformers.
From E: “Re: Philips. More ‘silent layoffs’ that avoid drawing attention to their stock dropping.” The company has reportedly laid off around 10,000 employees in the past year or two. PHG shares are up 10% over the past 12 months, but are off nearly 60% from their five-year high in April 2021.
From Ken: “Re: VA EHRM. Is nobody noticing that the plan is now to have no implementations in 2025?” The VA says that its next Oracle Health go-live has been moved back again, this time until mid-2026. Its most recent of its six live VA Medical Centers was in March 2024, although that’s with an asterisk because it was at Lovell FHCC, which is jointly operated between the VA and DoD. Oracle Health is live in three of the VA’s 18 VISNs (Veterans Integrated Services Networks), with the planned Michigan go-lives in 2026 adding no new ones since VISN 10 is already live in Columbus, OH. The VA originally said that all of its deployments would be completed by 2028, 10 years after it signed a $10 billion no-bid contract with Cerner. A VA-commissioned independent life cycle cost estimate in 2022 said the project will cost more than $50 billion.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
It’s Christmas or nothing for the most important winter holiday, most poll respondents said.
New poll to your right or here: Where does today’s health AI fall on the Gartner Hype Cycle?
I usually throw out an invitation for companies whose marketing budget resets on January 1 to contact me about becoming an HIStalk sponsor, which unlike conference booths or pay-for-play video interviews, offers benefits for a full year. I’ll even add a spiff or two for startups (the definition of which is beneficially vague to such prospects) or former sponsors who come back.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Telemedicine provider Avel ECare acquires Hospital Pharmacy Management, which offers remote pharmacy order verification and hospital pharmacy management.
William Febbo, CEO of drug company marketing technology firm OptimizeRx, leaves the company
Sales
- Duly Health will implement Pro Medicus’s Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform in a 10-year, $19 million contract.
People
Workforce management technology vendor Hallmark hires Michelle Lichte (Nordic Consulting Partners) as chief client success officer and promotes Brandon Chamberland to chief strategy and partnerships officer.
Haffty Consulting promotes Mark Valutkevich to VP of client services.
Announcements and Implementations
Critics warn that Health New Zealand’s planned layoff of 1,100 digital and data jobs will impact patient care and increase the risk of cyberattacks. Health NZ said two weeks ago that it will cancel or defer 136 IT projects in hopes of saving $62 million following government budget cuts. It had previously diverted funds from its widely touted Patient Summary data sharing system to stabilize its aging, unstable payroll system.
A new study finds that telehealth visits are not reliable for diagnosis tonsillitis due to the lack of ability to remotely assess all of the CENTOR diagnostic criteria (fever, tonsillar exudates, lymph node tenderness, and absence of cough) to determine if antibiotics are indicated.
Other
It’s probably more true now than ever, due to declining reading comprehension and pervasive clickbait, that the headline writer is more influential than the reporter. Shame on NPR for making TL;DR types think that Y2K was an IT cry-wolf overreaction or meme-to-be, while the actual story acknowledges that January 1, 2000 was uneventful only because an army of programmers — many of them gray-haired COBOL coders who were brought out of retirement — reviewed and fixed billions of lines of legacy code by the hard-stop due date.
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Phillips – not sure it’s ever been a great place to work. I sold MR and CT at Siemens for 15 years, and had the business card of every Phillips sales and support person in my patch…”If you have any opportunities…”.
As one of the Y2K army of programmers, I can assure you there would have been major outages and errors without the massive remediation effort. And I suspect that it would not have been as bad as the hype at the time if it hadn’t been fixed, especially since we were much less dependent on our technology at the time. And just for fun, if we are still running those persistent COBOL systems in 8000 years, we will find out that the Y2K remediation failed to address the Y10K problem.