Y2K Operation Critical

Miss a friend’s special day and you can always send a belated birthday card. But miss the Dec. 31 deadline for upgrading a major computer system to Y2K compliance and you have big, big trouble.

Especially if that system is the brains of the Ventura County Medical Center--the master administrative computer that runs the hospital, keeping track of patient registration, services and billing.

Concerned that efforts to install a Y2K-ready system to do all that were falling behind, the Board of Supervisors last week approved spending an extra $600,000 for more help to get the job done. Hospital officials disagree on whether the problem is truly as critical as it has been portrayed, but J. Matthew Carroll, head of information systems for the county, believes the county had no choice.

“We’re supplementing existing staff to make sure it is done on time,” Carroll said. “We can’t mess around. We have to get them in.”

We agree. The risk of letting the critical flow of medical information be disrupted, even briefly, is unacceptable. It is disheartening that this vital task was allowed to fall dangerously behind schedule. The past year has been a chaotic one for the medical center and its chief, county Health Care Agency Director Pierre Durand. But it’s hard to think of a more pressing priority than making sure Y2K upgrades are completed by Dec. 31.

We are now just seven weeks from that nonnegotiable deadline, the moment when 1999 ticks over into the year 2000. For people, it will be time to celebrate the dawn of a new century and millennium (although sticklers correctly point out that the 21st century doesn’t technically begin for another year). But the much-ballyhooed year 2000 glitch could confuse computers and other electronic devices that use two digits to denote the year, as in ’99 and ‘00, into thinking it had just become 1900.

The extra money brings the total tab to $4.5 million for a new computer system at the medical center and a network of 22 clinics that serve 300,000 poor and uninsured patients a year. The hospital project has been the most expensive and troublesome to update of the county’s 99 major computer systems. The cost of updating the other 98 will total less than $9 million; nearly all of that work has been completed.

Among the parts of the hospital computer system that still aren’t ready are those that provide information about patients to the hospital’s laboratory, radiology and pharmacy clinics, and the software that connects the new administration system with the Meditech patient care system.

We are now just seven weeks from that, with the deadline looming. This is no time to be looking for bargains or taking a do-it-yourself approach. Because hospital administrators are reluctant to discuss details publicly, it’s hard to know exactly when it became clear that the work would not be completed in time. But had this task been given the attention it deserved earlier in the year, there would have been no need to spend the extra $600,000.