At many hospitals, that will mean beefing up staff by canceling vacations for the first two weeks of January, discharging all but the most critically ill patients and canceling all elective surgeries. Hospitals, more than most industries, depend on outside suppliers for daily operations, and many of those vendors have their own Y2K problems to resolve. The hospital's power company, Central Vermont Public Service Corp., is unable to guarantee that power supply won't be disrupted. All hospitals have emergency power generators - the problem is lining up enough diesel fuel to handle a prolonged outage. A spokesman for Central Vermont said the utility expects to be ready by Jan. 1 but can't be certain that other companies in its supply network will come through.
Patients never see many of the most basic hospital services that depend on computers.
The temperature, humidity and air flow in their rooms are regulated by microchip control sensors. Fire alarms have date-sensitive microchips to automatically dial local fire departments in an emergency. All interconnect to other systems. A hospital's elevators may be programmed to override a Y2K glitch, he says, but they will still stop automatically if a fire alarm goes off. Hospital administrators at the 200-bed Pocono Medical Center, in East Stroudsburg, Pa., are bracing for that possibility by placing emergency gurneys in all their stairwells.