[tz] Epic fail for DST fallback in hospital health records

Sydney Lupkin reports in today's Kaiser Health News that Epic Systems, a leading system used for hospital health records, cannot handle DST fallbacks such as Sunday's fallback in the US. Lupkin writes: 'Carol Hawthorne-Johnson, an ICU nurse in California, said her hospital doesn’t shut down the Epic system during the fall time change. But she’s come to expect that the vitals she enters into the system from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. will be deleted when the clock falls back to 1 a.m. One hour’s worth of electronic record-keeping “is gone,” she said.' Apparently competing systems have similar problems. Lupkin writes that many hospitals plan for Cerner (another major system) to be down after a DST fallback as well. Dr. Steven Stack, past president of the American Medical Association, said these DST glitches are "unacceptable", considering that Apple and Google seem to have dealt with seasonal time changes long ago. Although Lupkin didn't say so, credit should be given to the design for the Unix operating system that is the basis for these successes of Apple and Google, as Unix standardized on UTC in the early 1970s; apparently Epic and Cerner (both founded 1979) did not get the message. The moral of this story seems to be: arrange for your medical emergencies to occur some time other than early Sunday in the US. Source: Lupkin S. Like Clockwork: How Daylight Saving Time Stumps Hospital Record Keeping. Kaiser Health News. 2018-11-03. https://khn.org/news/like-clockwork-how-daylight-saving-time-stumps-hospital-record-keeping/