Y2K and hospital building management systems-a post-mortem

For some years, governments, utilities and industry have been hard at work to make their computer systems Y2K compliant. The objective of the paper is to document the measures taken to provide Alberta utilities, universities and hospitals with assessment of Y2K readiness and finding solutions for different subsystems. The effectiveness and efficacy of these methods are examined in the light of the post-mortem analysis conducted after ringing in the year 2000. Typically, each hospital building has its own building management system (BMS) that controls and monitors life-supporting activities. Critical components range from HV AC equipment, boilers, chillers, air-handling units, filters to elevators, emergency power generators, lighting, flow meters, leak detectors, fire alarm systems, parking access systems, security systems, food storage units, warmers, freezers, pagers, patient monitoring systems, telephones, fares and cash registers. A complicating factor in BMS is that they are not designed to work independently. If some of the components are put on manual, it is basically impossible to control. Additional complicating factors are: each component system differs from manufacturer to manufacturer and each one is controlled by one or more microprocessors which are date sensitive. Some have hardware clock for DOY (day of the year) and a software clock for DOW (day of the week) while others keep track of DOY in a central CPU and leave the task for DOW to local CPU. Extensions to existing systems, using different versions of the same or new manufacturers pose additional problems. The paper discusses the steps taken by hospital building management systems to minimize Y2K fallout and the results achieved