Know What Time It Is? Your Medical Device Doesn't 290
An anonymous reader writes "A man with one clock knows what time it is, goes the old saw, a man with two is never sure. Imagine the confusion, then, experienced by a doctor with dozens. Julian Goldman is an anaesthetist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. After beginning to administer blood-thinning medication during an urgent neurological procedure in 2005, Mr Goldman noticed that the EMR had recorded him checking the level of clotting 22 minutes earlier. As a result, four hospitals in the northeast had their medical devices checked, and found that on average they were off by 24 minutes. The easy solution that devices could have used since 1985? NTP."
NTP, GPS, PTP all have problems (Score:4, Interesting)
NTP have the problem of discontinuing his UTC timestamp while a leap second occur and NTP do not broadcast the actual UTC-TAI offset (historically because he broadcast UTC directly but this is now more a problem that an advantage). GPS and PTP broadcast (something very closely related to) TAI and a UTC-TAI offset, witch is the right thing to provides the precise actual time without discontinuity.
But all of them, NTP, GPS and PTP, have the problem of not broadcasting the historical leap second table, making the client of those protocols alone unable to safely compute a precise date in the past. I hope next NTP protocol will broadcast TAI, and that NTP, GPS and PTP will be able one day to broadcast the leap second table. I am certain that there is still some reserved bits somewhere in those protocol to make that working.
Re:NTP and hospitals (Score:2, Interesting)
I am just playing with one said GPS unit. US$50, plus USB/Serial cable, plus conversion chips. 4h work, less than US$80 in hardware. There are ready made units for around $400, with a rubidium standard if the GPS is not available.
Not having a time standard is beyond not acceptable.
Re:Run your own NTP if it matters (Score:2, Interesting)
Um, what? You realize somewhere in the radio there is a downconverter? That means a mixer, whether digital or analog, and these things will leak RF unless they're built so well that they won't fit in a body.The GPS receiver itself is sensitive to ridiculously low signal levels like -140, -160dBm. It's not that hard for someone to build a receiver with equivalent sensitivity to whatever the downcoverter is running at.