Twice a year we experience this time changing event of first springing forward then falling back. Most recently, the time period between these two annual events was shortened by almost three and half weeks. This daylight savings time (DST) ritual dates back to an earlier era when Benjamin Franklin (the guy on $100 dollar bills!) visited Paris in 1784 and observed this daylight time saving method as a means of sparing the use of candles to provide light! Even back then we were thinking about energy conservation.
So what does this have to do with medical equipment or even the professionals that provide service? Well, quite a bit. A vast majority of medical devices today have some kind of time clock function – be it a display, recording stamp or other means of establishing time an exhibiting it. These medical device time events as a result of an action or some other relevant process then become a chartable data point -“history” in a patient’s medical record. The accuracy of these electronically recorded time events become a critical milestone in the patients administered care history.
Okay – so we have established the reasoning and purpose of why time recording is important and its relationship to the patient. So what does this have to do with the professionals that perform service? As many medical devices today have within their operating system the automated function that updates its internal clock and in turn performs the “daylight time change”. There are still many medical devices that do not have this technology or intelligence. These medical devices vary from non-critical to critical types. The reliance and necessity of their time recording or visible clock may be deemed necessary in the appropriate delivery and administering of care to the patient. It’s these devices that require a human intervention to adjust their time clocks and align them with the DST change. Many of today’s devices allow the clinical user the ability to perform the task quite easily, though there are several still requiring a more intimate technical knowledge or ability to access the commands enabling the time update. Depending on the criticality of the medical device and its relationship in administering patient care the need for the update to occur at the designated DST (2:00AM) hour change may require that technical person to perform the time update service making the device current and accurate with all of its pertinent patient care data point recordings.
This manual task of updating a medical device’s DST setting in the “wee hours” of the morning has always been a thorn in the side and source of contention with many HTM professionals in the field. Remember though as the patients and their families may be sleeping comfortably while you work a contributing reason why they can is because of the behind the scenes people like yourself, the HTM professional performing the critical tasks that keeps them and their loved ones safe.