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Comment by cliveowen | Hacker News Reader

When it come to the sad state of technology in hospitals, any improvement is better than the current state of things. Sure, this is the kind of software that would really benefit from redundancy and a waterproof disaster-recovery plan, but the main thing here is that someone tried and actually managed to make a dent into a very real problem in the industry. This is a small step in what I hope will be a near-term future for better healthcare. You have to start somewhere.

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I don't think I've communicated clearly:

Bad paper handoffs beat no handoffs at all, or I suppose ad hoc last minute verbal ones, if this system is dead due to a transient communications outage.

Do you disagree with this point?

Existing electronic health record (EHR) systems already have to deal with this.

The ones I am most familiar with have on-site data centers, so it's not purely in "the cloud" but you can have webapps running from on-site servers and call them "cloud" systems if you want.

The existing systems have ways for printing out important data from a redundant computer system to hand out paper copies if the user workstations, network, or servers are down. I don't know what they would do if there was no electricity anywhere, but I assume hospitals could use their backup generators for this since medical equipment also needs electricity.

Hospitals tend to have specially provisioned power from the local electric company to minimize the change they'll have to use generators, which I assume are universally in place, although you can't always depend on them, e.g. Charity Hospital in New Orleans (a place where my mother worked in the '50s) only suffered a flooded basement during Katrina ... but of course that was were the generators were.

See my other comment for how this company sure doesn't seem to be telling hospital IT departments that they've got on side redundancy.

i don't think cloud means on a public infrastructure. It's a term widely abused, I think they mean it's on a server and can be accessed by multiple clients through a common API. That also means that is likely a self-hosted solution that runs on the same backup-generators the hospital uses during outages.

This is what their web page says for hospital IT departments (http://www.medisas.com/product#it-depts):

"100% in the cloud and monitored 24/7 by our highly skilled technical team, so you won’t have to worry about getting your servers back up.

The specialist IT console allows you to monitor and control the system from your computer, tablet or phone.

Naturally, we use the same level of security as banks and government security organisations.

Finally, hassle free software for you & your organisation."

"100% in the cloud" and the rest doesn't sound like they're putting a system in the hospital to me. I'll bet it doesn't sound like it to hospital IT departments, and that could well be shooting down a lot of sales, and damaging their reputation for those who remember it as this.

If they are putting a system in the hospital, this would very poor advertising copy, an unforced error.

Then you might be right, but I hope that's not the case.

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