Remote Presence Doctor

[ryoder 1,400]

I was doing a ride-along with an ambulance crew yesterday.
We took a stroke patient in to an Emergency Department.
She was seen by the regular doctor on duty, and the also a Neurologist.
This was how the latter showed up:

http://www.intouchhealth.com/products-and-services/products/rp-lite/

I couldn't help thinking of Max Headroom.

Here is a video about the device: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33Mu7mpSzH8

"There are only three things of value: younger women, faster airplanes, and bigger crocodiles" - Arthur Jones.

[theonlyski 3]

This is one of the reasons I never want to be on the IT team for a hospital.

"I may be a dirty pirate hooker...but I'm not about to go stand on the corner." iluvtofly
DPH -7, TDS 578, Muff 5153, SCR 14890
I'm an asshole, and I approve this message

[ryoder 1,400]

theonlyski

This is one of the reasons I never want to be on the IT team for a hospital.

I spent years working in a hospital before college.
Then I spent years working in corporate IT, before I left it.
And from what I've observed, medical people are a hell of a lot less hysterical when things go wrong, than the headless chickens in the corporate world.

"There are only three things of value: younger women, faster airplanes, and bigger crocodiles" - Arthur Jones.

[theonlyski 3]

ryoder

***This is one of the reasons I never want to be on the IT team for a hospital.

I spent years working in a hospital before college.
Then I spent years working in corporate IT, before I left it.
And from what I've observed, medical people are a hell of a lot less hysterical when things go wrong, than the headless chickens in the corporate world.

Interesting. Around here people act like someone is dying if this specific PC is broken... I guess maybe the medical staff understand that it's not quite that serious that they can't get to facebook for a few minutes.

"I may be a dirty pirate hooker...but I'm not about to go stand on the corner." iluvtofly
DPH -7, TDS 578, Muff 5153, SCR 14890
I'm an asshole, and I approve this message

[ryoder 1,400]

Consider this:

Hospital: One per month, the guy on 3rd shift would check with the shift nursing supervisor that no emergency surgeries were in progress or pending. Then he would go down to the basement, and throw a big lever on an electrical panel which would disconnect the hospital from the power grid. He would time how many seconds it took for the emergency generators to auto-start and provide power to the subset of circuits on backup power. Then he would run the building that way for a full hour. If the generators didn't come online with 10 seconds, maintenance would be scheduled on them ASAP.

Corporate: We would design networks with redundant devices/links, and tell management that we needed to do monthly tests to verify the backup devices/links. Then every damned time we tried to schedule a test at night or on the weekend, the managment fools would scream:

"Oh, no! we can't take those down! Those are mission critical!"

So "mission critical" that we were not allowed to verify the backups even worked. So nearly every damned timed a device/link failed, we would learn the hard way that the backup design was not working due to either a hw failure, or an erroneous config change. Then (mis)management's knee-jerk reaction would be that we needed more bureaucracy in config changes, but still no testing allowed.

"There are only three things of value: younger women, faster airplanes, and bigger crocodiles" - Arthur Jones.

[theonlyski 3]

That's the truth too. It would be easier to move a mountain than to reboot one of the cores around here.

"I may be a dirty pirate hooker...but I'm not about to go stand on the corner." iluvtofly
DPH -7, TDS 578, Muff 5153, SCR 14890
I'm an asshole, and I approve this message

[DiverMike 5]

My first IT Job was at a Skilled Nursing Facility/Retirement Home.
In that environment, an emergency was "a life threatening event", so emergencies did not exist in IT.
In all my corporate gigs since, emergencies have been defined as mail servers going down, EDI Servers not responding to pings, blah, blah, blah.

For the same reason I jump off a perfectly good diving board.