Hospitals Test Y2K Readiness

The year 2000 dawned at hospitals across the state Thursday, bringing power and phone failures, compromised water supplies, a rash of bullet wounds and women in labor.

It was just a drill, of course, an exercise of simulated difficulties designed to assess how hospitals would handle the flood of problems and assist each other in bleak circumstances. For the most part, the facilities passed the test, discovering valuable information about where they are vulnerable to possible Y2K glitches in computers and other technology.

“We learned that we have a disaster plan and it works,” said Dr. Eric A. Weiss, associate director of trauma and chairman of the Stanford University Medical Center disaster committee.

“It’s going smoothly, but not perfectly,” said Kirsten Schneider, a spokeswoman for the 357-bed Sutter General Hospital in Sacramento. “We expected that. You have to work through the processes and get the questions answered.”

The biggest problem to crop up during the exercise: A new statewide computer system was unable to display the number of hospital beds available for incoming patients in the five-county area from San Luis Obispo County to Orange County.

Officials at the state Emergency Medical Services Authority, though, had the information on paper, as did county and regional emergency officials.

A detailed hospital-by-hospital count of patients and beds throughout the region should have shown thousands of beds available, but the state authority’s computer system was showing line after line of zeros, with fewer than 30 beds available in the region.

“Oh, my God! It is a pile of zeros,” said state Sen. Debra Bowen (D-Marina del Rey) as she looked at the information on the emergency agency’s Web site. “It’s a darn good thing they are doing an exercise.”

The drill was followed by a federal report that shows the health care industry among those rated the least prepared for year 2000 computer problems, she said.

Emergency management officials said they worked through the morning to correct the software problem. By midafternoon the information was available on the state’s internal emergency system, though not yet on the authority’s public Web site.

“[Fixing problems] is what the test is for,” said Shirley Tsagris, spokeswoman for the state authority. “It was a pretty minor thing and was discovered before the exercise, but not in enough time to fix by the start of the exercise.”

About 425 of 500 hospitals statewide participated in the test. The drill was designed primarily to assess the emergency medical communications network and its back-up systems and gather data on emergency resources.

Throughout the state, many hospitals used the drill to simulate conditions they might face New Year’s Eve: patient emergencies, power problems, extreme rain or snow conditions and hazardous-waste spills caused by computer shutdowns.

In Sacramento, the scenario included more than 200 revelers hurt at the city’s new convention center. At Sutter General, 14 volunteers showed up at the emergency room with lifelike injuries ranging from broken bones to an eyeball that had popped out.

In the San Fernando Valley, the administration at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills simulated a 20% increase in patient load, with accident victims and women in labor.

“We stressed the hospital [staff] with more than what we’re expecting on Dec. 31,” said David Doughman, a spokesman for Providence Health Systems, which runs the hospital.

At Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, 20 faux patients--including psychotics convinced that the world was ending, and a couple of gunmen--flooded the emergency department within 30 minutes of the make-believe midnight.

Stanford found out that its emergency room is quickly overwhelmed by such an influx, that supplies run low, and communications between departments and the hospital command post are key. Radio contact is both extremely important and potentially problematic, the medical center staff learned during the drill. “The problem with the radio is noise [in the emergency room],” Weiss said. “You need headphones and earpieces for the radios.”

In Orange County, a real emergency--a break in a major street gas line--disrupted plans by Children’s Hospital of Orange County and St. Joseph Hospital to take an active part in the drill.

Though the two hospitals reported their bed-availability data to the county, both facilities called off simulations.

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Times staff writers Eric Bailey in Sacramento, Maria L. La Ganga in San Francisco, Roberto J. Manzano in the San Fernando Valley and Hudson Sangree in Los Angeles contributed to this story.